As their nickname suggests, murder hornets are savvy killers. When they find a honeybee nest, the hornets go into “slaughter phase,” where they use their mega mandibles to kill and decapitate the bees by the thousands. Once they\\\’ve slaughtered the hive — it takes just a few hornets several hours to take out an entire tens of thousands-strong hive — the hornets defend the hive as their own, snatching up the brood inside to feed their own offspring, WSDA said.
The giant hornet can also inject prey with a sizable amount of venom to deliver a painful sting, WSDA said. The amount of venom injected in one sting could kill a human, though such fatalities are rare, according to WSDA.
With this first sighting of 2021, WSDA will set up live traps in the area; entomologists will then tag the trapped hornet so they can track the individual back to its nest. Because the sighting occurred just a half-mile (0.8 km) from the U.S.-Canada border, officials there will also set up additional traps, WSDA reported in the statement.
Last fall, WSDA used the same strategy to track these giant hornets. Once a nest was located in the hollow portion of a tree, WSDA crews had to don protective suits and face shields to get close enough to the nest for extermination. They filled the basketball-size nest with foam and then sucked the 100 to 200 hornets into vacuum canisters, Live Science reported at the time. To kill off any remaining insects, WSDA wrapped the tree where the nest was found in plastic and filled it with carbon dioxide.
