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

“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 coloniesexterminated 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.

… read more

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.

Read the rest of the story at The Globe and Mail.

Selected Articles

On this Social Network, Sea Ice, Traditional Foods, and Wildlife Are Always Trending

HAKAI MAGAZINE — Using an app developed by Inuit in Nunavut, Indigenous communities from Alaska to Greenland are harnessing data to make their own decisions.

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.

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.

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.

How Ron Pittaway developed his acclaimed winter finch forecast

LIVING BIRD MAGAZINE, Winter 2020 — Pittaway has made it his mission to lend some predictability to winter finch sightings by compiling intelligence from his network of naturalists across Canada and the U.S. and analyzing the data to reveal his predictions.

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.

Researchers pull together to get fuller picture of Greenland sled dog

ARCTIC TODAY — For more than 10,000 years, dogs have been an integral part of Arctic culture. They have guided sleds across frozen seas, barked warnings of polar bears and sniffed out seal breathing holes.

Butterflies in the storm

BIOGRAPHIC — Battling rising seas and creeping asphalt, scientists race to save two endangered species.

With warming temperatures, Canada’s Arctic glaciers are melting faster

ARCTIC TODAY — Most of Canada’s Arctic glaciers are shrinking — and some are already gone. Researchers in two separate studies documented dramatic changes beginning in the 1990s after decades of stability.

Cost of Arctic fieldwork limits research

SCIENCE — Funding sources are often insufficient to cover expenses, limiting scientists from understanding how Arctic ecosystems are responding to climate change.

Sea change

BIOGRAPHIC — The Arctic Ocean is beginning to look and act more like the Atlantic. It’s a shift that threatens to upend an entire food web built on frigid waters.

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.

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.

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.

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