Asian hornet APP

[madasafish]

According to the NBU, 5 nests were destroyed in October 2023. All appear to be in Kent.
By October it is likely queens will have been raised and departed the nests. Depending on nest size and maturity, think of a number between 0 and 500 odd queens per nest overwintering in Kent.

I cannot find the exact figures for Jersey but 170 odd nests were found between August and year end. So likely to be 30+ of nests producing overwintering queens.

 

[fian]

According to the NBU, 5 nests were destroyed in October 2023. All appear to be in Kent.
By October it is likely queens will have been raised and departed the nests. Depending on nest size and maturity, think of a number between 0 and 500 odd queens per nest overwintering in Kent.

I cannot find the exact figures for Jersey but 170 odd nests were found between August and year end. So likely to be 30+ of nests producing overwintering queens.

The date on which the drones and queens begin to emerge for fertilization flights before hibernation is usually between September 1 and 15.

 

[hemo]

According to the NBU, 5 nests were destroyed in October 2023. All appear to be in Kent.
By October it is likely queens will have been raised and departed the nests. Depending on nest size and maturity, think of a number between 0 and 500 odd queens per nest overwintering in Kent.

I cannot find the exact figures for Jersey but 170 odd nests were found between August and year end. So likely to be 30+ of nests producing overwintering queens.

Week of 03/11 a nest was destroyed and also 17/11, so two later nests.
One assumes via a detailed inspection of said nests, it can be assessed to whether Queens have been raised & released .

One can assume there is a good chance of over wintered queens appearing next year from these shores.

 

[madasafish]

Week of 03/11 a nest was destroyed and also 17/11, so two later nests.
One assumes via a detailed inspection of said nests, it can be assessed to whether Queens have been raised & released .

One can assume there is a good chance of over wintered queens appearing next year from these shores.

A certainty.

As for Jersey!

And the French are stopping destroying nests over 4.5m high due to cost!
(We will too if we keep using cherry pickers)

 

[madasafish]

Any action we can take - which will be effective - will be illegal - or not recommended. I for one will be using selective traps =- as I have already posted - as the naysayers do not appear to have logical plan which is feasible given restricted resources of people and money.

Anyone who does any kind of simple critical path analysis of what is required given a few hundred queens appearing in Spring would know that.

So I assume either:
-no critical path analysis has been done. Unlikely.

Or

Critical Path analysis has been done. Much more likely.
Which shows the obvious bottlenecks and issues but is being held up due to disagreements over policy, money, personalities, politics or all combined.
Clearly the first thing is to allow AH release by people to track independently of the NBU. That would make nest discovery faster , cheaper and relieve NBU resources.
Effort: form filling.


After that, we are talking real changes in policy. Physical nest destruction - as the French has proved - is slow, costly and does not work well.
The alternative is slow nest poisoning by using hornets to do so. That will never be approved.

In my view, the outlook is bad because of paucity of information and zero leadership.

Anyone who asks for more money or resources (the same thing) can be ignored as out of touch. The Government has more important things to do.
(like wasting £hundreds of millions on lawyers and achieving nothing and preparing to win an Election)

 

[OldFarm]

Simon said that 4 AH nests were found (and destroyed) in close proximity to his apiary, which would be enough to do some very serious damage. He's also in an area that is very protected from the elements, with woodlands that rarely suffer from frost and difficult to penetrate, so a high risk area. So it's possible there were other nests that remained undetected.

I was talking to a beekeeper in France recently. He noticed AHs sniffing around his hives from 2006, but says he hasn't lost any to AHs. He questioned if all the losses reported are truly down to AHs, which is something that was mirrored by Andrew Durham in his presentation last night. Other factors affecting colony loss (in order of significance) included climate change, financial viability (retail outlets buying in cheaper honey from China and Eastern Europe), increase of pesticides and pathogens, varroa treatments not being as effective as in the past and finally AHs. He said AHs were the final straw, not the root cause.

 

[OldFarm]

Well all I can say is the methods used in Jersey have been effective at killing nests but, of course, not preventing new nest numbers increasing exponentially.#
So to scale up the Jersey strategy - which appears to be the plan for England - is very "brave",

#
Asian hornet nests Jersey

2022 60
2023 335

To accuse anyone of scaremongering when the physical evidence IS scary is VERY brave.

Last year was a warm, which led to a surge year for the hornets. The met office predict 2024 will be another record warm year = another surge year. Increased numbers of hornet nests are closely aligned to the weather. We should all be keeping our fingers crossed for a cold snap at the end of March to bump off AHs.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Everything done by the The NBU . They plan to combat AH in England with a workforce roughly equal to four times the Jersey AH team.

Not really true though is it? NBU may be the public face of it and have the infrastructure and organisational resources in place but people tend to ignore that the Non-native Species Secretariat also work away in the background. in the presentation given to the Wales and West BFA in Symonds Yat back last October, a few of them were there with the RBI giving the talk and had spent most of the summer down in the South of England working on the response and, after the meeting were hotfooting it back down there.

 

[Karol]

According to the NBU, 5 nests were destroyed in October 2023. All appear to be in Kent.
By October it is likely queens will have been raised and departed the nests. Depending on nest size and maturity, think of a number between 0 and 500 odd queens per nest overwintering in Kent.

I cannot find the exact figures for Jersey but 170 odd nests were found between August and year end. So likely to be 30+ of nests producing overwintering queens.

And you have it on authority that the nests matured and released their sexual gynes?

FYI the summer in the UK was largely below average temperature wise (and nearly 10°C cooler than 2022) during the months that matter for velutina. Yes we had a slightly warmer September but not enough to compensate for the colder July/August. So wasp nests were late maturing last year. Hornets being an apex predator of wasps lag in their life cycle behind wasps. We were seeing wasp nests mature as late as the end of October so unless you have evidence that the nests that were destroyed had released their queens you are playing chicken little prematurely.

I'm happy to stand corrected if any one has evidence that the destroyed nests had released their sexual gynes. I haven't heard anything to that effect. But even if they had and even if collectively there were 2,500 queens released, what of the failure rate of these queens? By and large when populations of vespines become saturated only ONE queen will survive from each nest. The vast majority of queens die due to starvation, predation and usurpation. Saturation is reached when there is insufficient resource for unfettered propagation. This is the nub of the strategy in the UK promoted by the NBU. If you undertake spring trapping this year you will simply remove competition from native vespines which will unfetter velutina and increase the survival rate of any velutina queens struggling to gain a foot hold. Even when conditions are far from saturation, the vast majority of velutina queens will perish anyway.

Spring trapping this year will be nothing short of crass stupidity. Why? Because your chance of catching just one of the 2500 mated queens is so improbable as to be effectively negligible. Even if you did catch one, the likelihood is that it would not survive anyway. So, you will be setting traps prophylactically on the never never. What you will absolutely do is unnecessarily sacrifice native vespines which will most definitely have an impact and create an opening for velutina to exploit.

What I don't understand is why it is so difficult for some beekeepers to comprehend that setting monitoring stations is the best course of action to take at this time. They do not need to be monitored 24/7 because once found if there are any velutina around they will programme feed on the bait station and will be there within a two hour window of whatever time the bait station is inspected. The flight time of a wasp based on optimal nutrition is circa 50 minutes - probably slightly less for velutina because it is a bigger insect - so within a couple hours you can expect programme feeding velutina to return to the bait station.

More importantly, the behaviour of velutina is sub-optimal in less favourable ecological locations. By that I mean that velutina has to subsidize its carbohydrate intake because it can't get enough carbohydrate from the brood within the nest simply because there isn't the availability of insect prey to support optimal growth and development. This means that sweet baited bait stations or the use of certain flowering bushes are ideal for detecting and monitoring the presence of velutina throughout the whole season. There is absolutely no justification for using protein baits which again is nothing short of crass stupidity because it will only serve to further destroy native vespine species at the height of them competing against velutina for insect prey. Another massive mistake in the strategy adopted in continental Europe.

Monitoring bait stations is not doing nothing. It is akin to manning the radar. If velutina subsequently appears at a bait station it is the easiest thing to substitute a trap in place of the bait station to catch and kill the velutina at its next visit because it will come back. So set bait stations which are harmless to native species and patiently observe. If velutina arrives swap the bait station for a trap. Contact the NBU. One massive danger with this approach you should be aware of is this. If the velutina that arrives at the bait station during the colony founding or early colony growth phase is not a queen but a worker and you kill it you may lose the only chance to track the worker back to the nest. If other workers then find an alternative food source out of your sight, they will recruit other workers to that alternative food source which will allow the nest to develop possibly even to maturation without you being able to assist in tracking it down and destroying it.

Nothing but nothing is simple or straight forward with vespines especially in our post truth world where opinion out ranks years of experience and science.

 

[Karol]

Last year was a warm, which led to a surge year for the hornets. The met office predict 2024 will be another record warm year = another surge year. Increased numbers of hornet nests are closely aligned to the weather. We should all be keeping our fingers crossed for a cold snap at the end of March to bump off AHs.

Sorry but wrong on both counts. Temperature wise July was below average and August was about average. These are the two most important months for velutina in the UK calendar. 2022 was far hotter with only a fraction of the number of velutina nests which runs contrary to your assertion. Strong April winds were responsible IMHO for the larger than average outbreak in 2023. I didn't hear of any reports in 2022 suggesting that any of the nests destroyed had released sexual gynes. Strong winters favour queen survival. Mild winters see queens coming out of hibernation prematurely when there isn't enough naturally occuring food so succumb to starvation. A cold snap, (i.e. a short cold duration) in March won't of itself trouble vespines to much. Much better to cross your fingers for a warm February, mild March, and cold and inclement thereafter especially though in July/August.

 

[Karol]

Last year I suffered a very high mortality rate,

Should we call you Fiankinstein?

this year at the moment it is very low and the difference is that I implemented more measures against the velutina, perhaps the most economical and very effective measure is the use of a reduced spout as well as restricting the flight of the hornets in the surroundings of the piquera. Velutina restricts the ability to forage and, together with another internal cause, can cause a collapse of the hive.

Do we take it that you were spring trapping last year?

 

[Antipodes]

Last year was a warm, which led to a surge year for the hornets. The met office predict 2024 will be another record warm year = another surge year. Increased numbers of hornet nests are closely aligned to the weather. We should all be keeping our fingers crossed for a cold snap at the end of March to bump off AHs.

Yes, it seems so. Upward trending.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67845671

 

[fian]

Should we call you Fiankinstein?

Do we take it that you were spring trapping last year?

Yes, I have been trapping since 2014 and I have not had nests in the trapping areas, close to homes or the apiary. This means that the apiary was free of velutina, that's why I know I had to implement measures.
Regarding the joke about the lack of coordination of the phrase, I will tell you that in Spanish using the first person in unfortunate situations shows empathy and I will also tell you that Galician is the only language with a pronoun to mean "solidarity in action."
Finally, it is curious how he avoids a response in a post where he either has little to gain, lacks a response, or improbably agrees.

 

[elainemary]

It's not about being brave.

It's about taking the best course of action to protect the UK from infestation.

The present advice is not to spring trap but to monitor, report and let the NBU do its work. Why is that so difficult to adhere to?

It's not helpful to be alarmist if that results in counter productive measures being taken.

So Jersey had 335 nests in 2023 and only 60 in 2022. What does that tell us that is of relevance to the UK? Very little.

Velutina hugs coastlines where inland ecology doesn't support it so no surprise Jersey will favour velutina being as it's a small island.

Jersey is only a stones throw from the French coast so there's a persistant resevoir of velutina to reinfest the island.

As for the jump from 60 to 335 that can also to an extent be explained by storm Noa.

There's no denying Jersey has a problem as does the continent but the problems there are different to what the UK is experiencing.

If the present measures do not work there will be plenty of opportunity to revise and change strategy. Not so easy to recover the situation the other way round which is where the continent is at.

It's not brave to support the NBU, follow their advice and give them grace to do what they need to do. I would call it sensible.

V sensible advice. Agree wholeheartedly

 

[elainemary]

The NBU policy at present is a bottleneck one. Everything done by the The NBU . They plan to combat AH in England with a workforce roughly equal to four times the Jersey AH team.
It is viable in Jersey or Kent, not in Southern England. Sorry not true. Jersey appears lost already/
All the conditions for warmer weather exist: Global Warming, El Nino. which make Southern England a paradise.
And the area of England at 130k Sq Kms is over 1,000 times that of Jersey at 113 sq Kms.

Jersey is lost.to AH. There are 24 volunteers basically full time fighting AH in Jersey. Scaled up to the UK, that means 24,000 people for England. The NBU has 82 in total. The gaps in the English countryside where there are few inhabitants means establishment is inevitable.

It would be risible if not so obviously doomed.

Guernsey has over 250 volunteers.
That’s why we need to wait as @Karol has said. Once the NBU have more information on nest and queens via DNA analysis, they will publish a new strategy and protocol for 24 which will include recruitment and training of beekeepers and keen members of the public to assist with track and trace. Leaving NBU to destroy nests.

Perhaps this could be a benefit of Brexit - control of our own borders and fast acting strategy like Covid vaccines. We just need to be patient for a short time was the message from the conference I attended in The south west last weekend.
“Your pollinators and your NBU need you!” should be the recruitment slogan IMHO

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

And you have it on authority that the nests matured and released their sexual gynes?

I'm happy to stand corrected if any one has evidence that the destroyed nests had released their sexual gynes.

contrary to the long awaited test results on last year's nests - release expected before long. the NBU have quickly issued press releases on the initial post mortems on destroyed nests - not one since the first Gloucester nest way back when was advanced enough to have released sexuals, in fact, in general the reports said that all the nests (and remember that the initial ones were very late discoveries) were poorly developed and had struggled to develop to full fruition.

 

[madasafish]

. Leaving NBU to destroy nests.

All we need is a lot of wind blown queens (the French are basically giving up) and a few overwintered queens and the NBU will be overwhelmed. In my view.
Talk of 2023 being a blip is - in my opinion - wrong.
France had a blip.
Jersey had a blip.
England had a blip.
Belgium had a blip.

That to me looks like a trend..

 

[madasafish]

And you have it on authority that the nests matured and released their sexual gynes?

FYI the summer in the UK was largely below average temperature wise (and nearly 10°C cooler than 2022) during the months that matter for velutina. Yes we had a slightly warmer September but not enough to compensate for the colder July/August. So wasp nests were late maturing last year. Hornets being an apex predator of wasps lag in their life cycle behind wasps. We were seeing wasp nests mature as late as the end of October so unless you have evidence that the nests that were destroyed had released their queens you are playing chicken little prematurely.

I'm happy to stand corrected if any one has evidence that the destroyed nests had released their sexual gynes. I haven't heard anything to that effect. But even if they had and even if collectively there were 2,500 queens released, what of the failure rate of these queens? By and large when populations of vespines become saturated only ONE queen will survive from each nest. The vast majority of queens die due to starvation, predation and usurpation. Saturation is reached when there is insufficient resource for unfettered propagation. This is the nub of the strategy in the UK promoted by the NBU. If you undertake spring trapping this year you will simply remove competition from native vespines which will unfetter velutina and increase the survival rate of any velutina queens struggling to gain a foot hold. Even when conditions are far from saturation, the vast majority of velutina queens will perish anyway.

Spring trapping this year will be nothing short of crass stupidity. Why? Because your chance of catching just one of the 2500 mated queens is so improbable as to be effectively negligible. Even if you did catch one, the likelihood is that it would not survive anyway. So, you will be setting traps prophylactically on the never never. What you will absolutely do is unnecessarily sacrifice native vespines which will most definitely have an impact and create an opening for velutina to exploit.

What I don't understand is why it is so difficult for some beekeepers to comprehend that setting monitoring stations is the best course of action to take at this time. They do not need to be monitored 24/7 because once found if there are any velutina around they will programme feed on the bait station and will be there within a two hour window of whatever time the bait station is inspected. The flight time of a wasp based on optimal nutrition is circa 50 minutes - probably slightly less for velutina because it is a bigger insect - so within a couple hours you can expect programme feeding velutina to return to the bait station.

More importantly, the behaviour of velutina is sub-optimal in less favourable ecological locations. By that I mean that velutina has to subsidize its carbohydrate intake because it can't get enough carbohydrate from the brood within the nest simply because there isn't the availability of insect prey to support optimal growth and development. This means that sweet baited bait stations or the use of certain flowering bushes are ideal for detecting and monitoring the presence of velutina throughout the whole season. There is absolutely no justification for using protein baits which again is nothing short of crass stupidity because it will only serve to further destroy native vespine species at the height of them competing against velutina for insect prey. Another massive mistake in the strategy adopted in continental Europe.

Monitoring bait stations is not doing nothing. It is akin to manning the radar. If velutina subsequently appears at a bait station it is the easiest thing to substitute a trap in place of the bait station to catch and kill the velutina at its next visit because it will come back. So set bait stations which are harmless to native species and patiently observe. If velutina arrives swap the bait station for a trap. Contact the NBU. One massive danger with this approach you should be aware of is this. If the velutina that arrives at the bait station during the colony founding or early colony growth phase is not a queen but a worker and you kill it you may lose the only chance to track the worker back to the nest. If other workers then find an alternative food source out of your sight, they will recruit other workers to that alternative food source which will allow the nest to develop possibly even to maturation without you being able to assist in tracking it down and destroying it.

Nothing but nothing is simple or straight forward with vespines especially in our post truth world where opinion out ranks years of experience and science.

Monitoring requires daily attention.
Spring trapping with selection requires occasional attention.


Selective traps are available now.

 

[Karol]

Monitoring requires daily attention.
Spring trapping with selection requires occasional attention.


Selective traps are available now.

Sorry but that is simply plain rubbish.

Monitoring of bait stations can be just as occasional as trapping but without the collateral damage. You just need a robust durable bait station.

 

[elainemary]

contrary to the long awaited test results on last year's nests - release expected before long. the NBU have quickly issued press releases on the initial post mortems on destroyed nests - not one since the first Gloucester nest way back when was advanced enough to have released sexuals, in fact, in general the reports said that all the nests (and remember that the initial ones were very late discoveries) were poorly developed and had struggled to develop to full fruition.

V interesting, thanks for sharing