Asian Hornet

• GeneralIt preys on honeybees at the hive entrance and is one of the main threats to European beekeeping.
• It hovers in front of the hive entrance and seizes in mid-air the bees coming and going, a technique the European honeybee has no answer to.
• Its secondary nests, the size of a beach ball or larger, hang high in the trees and only become visible when the leaves fall in autumn.
• Asian honeybees, which have coevolved with it, kill it by forming a ball around the hornet and raising the temperature until it cooks; European bees have no such behaviour.
• It reached Europe in 2004, in a container of pottery from China unloaded at the port of Bordeaux, and by 2010 it was already in Navarre.
• The adult feeds on ripe fruit and nectar; it is the larvae that eat meat, which is why the workers hunt bees to take back to them.
• The Asian honeybee Apis cerana knows how to defend itself by forming balls of workers that kill the hornet with heat, a behaviour the European honeybee does not have.
• Its nests far exceed those of the European hornet: several thousand individuals against rarely more than a thousand.
• As well as preying on them, it keeps hives under constant stress: the workers stop foraging, use up their stores and the colony collapses more readily in winter.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Woodland, farmland and damp suburban areas

Sexual maturity

The queen mated in autumn comes out of diapause from February onwards and founds a primary nest the size of a tennis ball; she never reuses the previous year's nest

Gestation / incubation

Developing a worker takes around 30 days in summer and up to about 55 in a cold spring

Litter / clutch size

A large nest houses about 2,000 wasps and at the end of the season produces several hundred fertile females, of which only the future founding queens survive the winter

Sources consulted: CREAF; Gobierno Vasco, Manual para la gestión de la avispa asiática (2016); Fundación Amigos de las Abejas; Ficha de especie de Vespa velutina; Fundacion Amigos de las Abejas, ficha Vespa velutina; Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, servicio de control de avispa asiatica; Ambiente Cero, ciclo de la avispa asiatica; MundoAbejas

Best time: Primary nests in spring and the colony at its peak in September and October, when the new queens are reared