Two Million Hornets
dark-mountain.net> In the last eight weeks, I have counted 361 queens. The meagre three traps might sound irrelevant in the face of the growing continental scale of the problem, and perhaps they are. However, a mature hornet nest in autumn can have 6,000 individuals, so potentially over two million fewer hornets will be patrolling our local landscape come autumn.
In case anyone is wondering about the number.
What an odd post to make the front page of HN.
Wouldn't some birds love to eat hornets?
Yes, the European honey buzzard would: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_honey_buzzard#Feeding
Good. Too bad they're not in Ireland. The country might lack woodland for them to breed in. Artificial nests perhaps? (I think many countries should invest in biodiversity also, on a strategic level, for multitude of reasons, but resilience to pests is one.)
> The Asian hornet has also gained a foothold over the last decade, since arriving in a shipment of pottery from China.
Merci, Mr. Sarkozy, for sitting in your ass doing absolutely nothing about the problem when it still could be contained to Aquitaine, in the years following 2006.
And what is not being said here, is that this animal can (and will) kill people. Easily.
The bodycount is probably between one and two hundred Europeans by now. Around 30-40 a year probably (joining France, Portugal, Spain and Germany).
https://archivo.infojardin.com/tema/primera-muerte-en-espana...
So if politicians are worried now about that... I'm saying that politely... go fuck yourselves. Some of us got hoarse trying to warn about it. Asturias only started to take seriously the Asian hornet after the brother of a local politician was killed at his forties by one single hornet, in a sort of European remake of "A Quiet Place".