The hornet has landed: Scientists combat new honeybee killer in US
An invasive yellow-legged wasp has been decimating beehives in Europe — and bedeviling Georgia since last summer. Researchers are working nest by nest to limit the threat while developing better eradication methods.
KNOWABLE MAGAZINE
In early August 2023, a beekeeper near the port of Savannah, Georgia, noticed some odd activity around his hives. Something was hunting his honeybees. It was a flying insect bigger than a yellowjacket, mostly black with bright yellow legs. The creature would hover at the hive entrance, capture a honeybee in flight and butcher it before darting off with the bee’s thorax, the meatiest bit.
“He’d only been keeping bees since March … but he knew enough to know that something wasn’t right with this thing,” says Lewis Bartlett, an evolutionary ecologist and honeybee expert at the University of Georgia, who helped to investigate. Bartlett had seen these honeybee hunters before, during his PhD studies in England a decade earlier. The dreaded yellow-legged hornet had arrived in North America.
With origins in Afghanistan, eastern China and Indonesia, the yellow-legged hornet, Vespa velutina, has expanded during the last two decades into South Korea, Japan and Europe. When the hornet invades new territory, it preys on honeybees, bumblebees and other vulnerable insects. One yellow-legged hornet can kill up to dozens of honeybees in a single day. It can decimate colonies through intimidation by deterring honeybees from foraging. “They’re not to be messed with,” says honeybee researcher Gard Otis, professor emeritus at the University of Guelph in Canada.
The yellow-legged hornet is so destructive that it was the first insect to land on the European Union’s blacklist of invasive species. In Portugal, honey production in some regions of the country has slumped by more than 35 percent since the hornet’s arrival. French beekeepers have reported 30 percent to 80 percent of honeybee colonies exterminated in some locales, costing the French economy an estimated $33 million annually.
All that destruction may be linked to a single, multi-mated queen that arrived at the port of Bordeaux, France, in a shipment of bonsai pots from China before 2004. During her first spring, she established a nest, reared workers and laid eggs. By fall, hundreds of new mated queens likely exited and found overwintering sites, restarting the cycle in the spring. The hornet’s fortitude — it is the Diana Nyad of invasive social wasps — allowed it to surge across France’s borders into Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Switzerland in only two decades, hurtling onward by as much as 100 kilometers a year.
As Canada’s boreal forests burn again and again, they won’t grow back the same way
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
In 2015, Ellen Whitman bushwhacked her way through a section of boreal forest in the southern Northwest Territories, near Fort Smith, and stepped into an open landscape, dotted with leafy trees. The area had once been thick with white spruce and some jack pine, but instead, Dr. Whitman saw trembling aspens surrounded by grassland.
“It was almost like a savannah,” said Dr. Whitman, who is a forest-fire research scientist at Natural Resources Canada in Edmonton. “It was a big change.”
Two fires had torn through the area less than 15 years apart. The first one burned the dense coniferous forest of older trees. The second killed off the young conifers that had sprouted after the first fire. The interval between the fires was too short for the trees to produce mature seeds and regenerate the forest on their own, allowing grasses, shrubs and deciduous trees to take root instead.
It’s a shift that threatens to recur across Canada’s boreal forest. As wildfires increase in size, severity and frequency, against a backdrop of warmer temperatures and persistent drought, the boreal is beginning to give way to birch, aspen, shrubs and grasses.
Climate change is making forest fire season longer, more extreme
TORONTO STAR — In the years to come, smoky days may become normal as human-caused climate change worsens wildfires across Canada and makes them harder to control.
Continue Reading Climate change is making forest fire season longer, more extreme
This is your brain on trees — why is urban nature so good for the mind?
THE GLOBE AND MAIL — Green space helps people feel less depressed and fatigued, and science is still exploring all the other ways it lifts our spirits. In a global crisis, we could all use more time in nature.
Continue Reading This is your brain on trees — why is urban nature so good for the mind?
Wasp Venom Can Save Lives. But the Supply Chain Is Shaky.
UNDARK — Venom is crucial to make medicines for those with severe allergic reactions to wasp, hornet, and yellow jacket stings.
Continue Reading Wasp Venom Can Save Lives. But the Supply Chain Is Shaky.
In Canada’s boreal forest, a new national park faces the wrongs of the past — and guards our climate future
AUDUBON — Thaidene Nëné, declared this summer, is a milestone for an Indigenous-led conservation movement that can help keep carbon in the ground and protect crucial habitat as the planet warms.
Butterflies in the storm
BIOGRAPHIC — As Hurricane Irma was bearing down on the Florida Keys last September, Erica Henry was watching from Raleigh, North Carolina. Henry, an ecologist, had packed up and left the Keys at the start of hurricane season and was supposed to be working on her doctoral thesis. But instead of writing code for a butterfly population model, she was checking and re-checking the hurricane’s projected path and posting anxious updates to Twitter.
Sea change
BIOGRAPHIC — On a cool morning in late July, the Oceania, a blue and white, three-masted research vessel, maneuvers through the dark waters of a fjord on the west coast of the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Craggy peaks streaked with snow rise sharply out of the water. Expansive sweeps of glacial ice plow between mountains and into the fjord, ending abruptly in towering turquoise walls. Chunks of ice drift by, sizzling and popping like sheets of bubble wrap as they melt and release air captured ages ago.
Nations put science before fishing in the Arctic
SCIENCE — Nine nations and the European Union have reached a deal to place the central Arctic Ocean (CAO) off-limits to commercial fishers for at least the next 16 years.
Continue Reading Nations put science before fishing in the Arctic
Europe’s triumphs and troubles are written in Swiss ice
NEW YORK TIMES — Pollen frozen in ice in the Alps traces Europe’s calamities, since the time Macbeth ruled Scotland.
Continue Reading Europe’s triumphs and troubles are written in Swiss ice
High stakes in the High North
BIOGRAPHIC — A remote island that harbored the word’s last mammoths is becoming a holdout for Arctic wildlife once again.
Using technology to find hidden graves
DISCOVER MAGAZINE — Forensic anthropologist Amy Mundorff wants to make the search for the missing safer and more successful.
Cities beat the heat
NATURE — Rising temperatures are threatening urban areas, but efforts to cool them may not work as planned.
A root of change
BRACING FOR IMPACT — The harvest of wild American ginseng root has been a part of North American culture for 300 years, but this tradition is in peril. Is it possible to save both a species and a pastime?
Greenland’s Disappearing Glaciers—A Tale of Fire and Ice
PBS-NOVA — Jason Box, a glaciologist who grew up in Colorado, watched the High Park wildfire disaster play out on television at LaGuardia Airport, waiting for a flight that would take him to Greenland. He suddenly had a thought: Could soot from the wildfires melt Greenland’s ice sheet?
Continue Reading Greenland’s Disappearing Glaciers—A Tale of Fire and Ice
Dept. of Household Sciences
THE LAST WORD ON NOTHING — There is an entire arm of physics devoted to the science of rubbing and scrubbing–and which has slipped into all aspects of life, including my kitchen. Today, these scientists study friction, lubrication and wear mostly because they’re interested in keeping machines running smoothly, not because they care about my countertops.
Lady of the lakes
NATURE — Diane Orihel set her PhD aside to lead a massive protest when Canada tried to shut down its unique Experimental Lakes Area.
In carbon sequestration, money grows on trees
DISCOVER MAGAZINE — Guyana’s tropical rainforests protected under the REDD program provide not just natural resources but an income stream to the country.
Continue Reading In carbon sequestration, money grows on trees
To catch a cheat
DISTILLATIONS PODCAST — How officials are investigating blood dopers at the Olympics.
Living machines
WIRED — This spring, a War of the Worlds-scale tripod carrying verdant laboratories on suspended platforms showed up in Nantes in western France. It was just the latest massive art-tech project from street theater company La Machine, which has been startling Europeans with giant robots for more than a decade.
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