Washington The state’s agriculture officials said Monday that the first “murder horn” structure discovered in the United States has been successfully destroyed.
The ongoing fight to stop the invading Asian giant horns, which could wreak havoc on bee colonies, is far from over and residents have been told to report any locations.
Ontologists were able to attach radio trackers to three hornets trapped in the trap last week, and one of them led them to the structure, which was discovered on Thursday and destroyed over the weekend.
While most Asian giant horned structures are in the ground, this was in a tree. The list of new devices was quickly drawn after the discovery because the essence of the time was: this is the time of year when any new queens can emerge from the nest.
“We wanted to make sure we could get the nest out as quickly as possible so that no queens could escape,” Sven Spichiger, managing entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told a video news conference on Monday.
On Saturdays, workers wore protective suits – hornets could repeatedly bite and spit out poison – foam was used to seal the crevices, the tree was wrapped in cellophane and then a vacuum hose was used to suck the hornets.
Carbon dioxide gas was added to kill what was left. The trees removed will be divided so that more studies can be done about the nest. “At this point, we consider each nest to be dead,” Spichiger said.
Blaine’s nest, located in Whatcom County on the U.S.-Canada border, is located in the U.S. The first horn nest was found in.
The Asian giant horn was first found in the state of Washington in December, and the first insect was trapped in July.
He is a native of Asia and has been documented in parts of China and India, and in Thailand, Malaysia and other countries, the U.S. said. Stated in the report of the Department of Agriculture. On December 8, a dead insect was found in Blaine.
The state’s agriculture department says a group of the world’s largest hornets could kill a whole colony of bees in hours. According to experts, insects do not usually attack people or pets, but will do so when threatened.
The cold weather helps the entomologist during the elimination on Saturday morning, Spichiger said.
He blamed the nest and was not attacked by any of the hornets – it is the opposite of eradicating workers in other parts of the world, where workers are surrounded by flying insects.
“No one was beaten, and no one was attacked, of which we are aware,” he said.
Employees’ anthologies have been seized, most in vacuum but 13 in the net on Friday, officials said.
Samples will be used in the research, which included some live hornets that will be tried by the USDA to determine what they attract and what chemicals they react to, which the U.S. In it is the first kind of opportunity, it will be studied. Others will be flash frozen and sent to other researchers and universities.
Honeybee’s population has been in a worrying decline. USDA Said last year that the U.S. The number of beehives in India dropped from 6 million in the 1940s to 2.5 million.
Efforts to eradicate the giant horn could take years, but out of the thousands of traps from Washington to Washington, there have only been hits in Whatcom County, Spichiger said.
Officials believe there are at least three other structures in the county.
“Even though we’re fighting this fight right here in Washington, it’s literally for the rest of the country.”
He said the housing model Dello shows that Asian giant horns are “perfectly suitable” for living anywhere, not just in the Pacific Northwest, but anywhere east of the Mississippi River.
