Asian killer hornet at Calais
<<Missing intro!!>>
The Asian hornet is about to cross the Channel. According to Didier Lucas of the Musée des Abeilles à Neuf Berquin, 30 miles from Calais, a honey producer saw a specimen in the area early November.
The Asian hornet is about to cross the Channel. According to Didier Lucas of the Musée des Abeilles à Neuf Berquin, 30 miles from Calais, a honey producer saw a specimen in the area early November.
The black and orange hornet is six times larger than a honey bee. It attacks people. When it bites, its sting is compared to a dentist’s needle entering a tooth nerve. A few specimens annihilate a whole beehive in minutes[1]. In its path, it has decimated thousands of colonies of honey bees by decapitation. After colonising the south of France, the Périgord and Normandy, the 3-inch wingspan insect reached Paris in 2009. It will be in South of England in a matter of years, or months according to some experts. The invader flies north bringing along its painful and mortal behaviour.
Max Micheli was attacked in a village south of Bordeaux and stung 32 times late October. He survived and tells his story: “I went to the attic and suddenly I saw that dark buzzing cloud enveloping me. It was like a horror movie! I knew they were Asian hornets. The swarm swooped down and rushed into my track suit. They were hitting from all sides. I tried to fight back. I saw death and fell in a coma.” The middle-aged businessman is lucky to be alive, his friend, 75-year-old Jérémy DuPlantier, managed to pull him down. The scene is still in the former science teacher’s mind. “They were probably 50 large ones clinging on him like suckers. A Steven Spielberg film! They were so aggressive. I thought he was dead!” Earlier in September, a 70-year-old woman died after a sting near her heart in Saint-Vincent-Lespinasse, a village in the south of France.
Pierre Dalous, a bird specialist from the Museum of Natural Sciences in Toulouse, thinks that “the problem with vespa velutina [scientific name of the insect] is that you don’t notice it. Its colours are as not bright as a wasp or a common hornet. So before you know it, they have already colonised your area. The nest can reach 90cm (3 feet). I am not an insect expert, but, for me, they are not aggressive.” Its adaptation is more worrying. According to the local-celebrity ornithologist, “that pest can survive temperatures above 40º centigrade and below freezing. So it can live almost anywhere.” Franck Muller is the French specialist on the Asian hornet[2]. “It progresses 100km per year” says the entomologist from the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. In his department, his 6-member team tracks the orangey-head striped insect on a map. It appears on half of the French territory. Pierre Dalous confirms this: “it has moved forward along the coast before going inland. The Frelon Asiatique [its French name] will reach England soon.”
What has puzzled the specialists is how the giant killer insect arrived in France in the first instance. One scientific hypothesis is that it came from China in porcelain teapots. A colleague of Franck Muller, Claire Villemant, is leading a team to Yixing, west of Shangai. She is capturing some local hornet for their DNA. The analysis will show if vespa velutina is a Chinese migrant and the teapot theory is true.
Check your teapot when you have your next cup, but it may already be too late for Bee Britannica.
[1] See an attack sample on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_DQYVppJG4
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