Asian giant hornet
Masato Ono, an entomologist at Tamagawa University, described an Asian giant hornet sting as "like a hot nail being driven into my leg". The insect behind that sting, Vespa mandarinia, is the largest hornet in the world. Its home stretches across temperate and tropical East Asia, South Asia, mainland Southeast Asia and parts of the Russian Far East. In late 2019 it appeared in North America, and officials set out to find it.
Why does one insect inspire such dread? How does a colony live, what does it hunt, and what happened when the hornet reached a new continent? The answers run from the structure of a colony to a debate over the hornet's very name.
A queen Asian giant hornet can exceed 50 mm in length, while her workers measure between 35 and 40 mm. The species overall has a body length of 45 mm and a wingspan around 75 mm. Queens and workers share the same reproductive anatomy, yet workers do not reproduce. Drones, the males, reach up to 38 mm and carry no stinger, a trait common across the Hymenoptera.
A light orange head and brown antennae with a yellow-orange base mark the hornet's face. The eyes and ocelli are dark brown to black. A pronounced clypeus and large genae, both facial features, set it apart from other hornets. Its orange mandible carries a black tooth that the hornet uses for digging. The thorax is dark brown, and the abdomen alternates dark bands with yellow-orange, with the sixth segment fully yellow.
Larvae spin a silk cocoon once they finish developing and are ready to pupate. Researchers see wide potential uses for the silk proteins, which can take the form of native fiber, sponge, film or gel.
Fossils from the Shanwang Formation show that the species has existed since the Miocene epoch. It belongs to Vespa, the genus of true hornets. Along with seven other species, it sits in the V. tropica group, defined by a single notch on the male's seventh gastral sternum. Its closest relative within that group is V. soror.
Scientists once tried to divide the genus into subgenera, then abandoned the effort. The species look too alike, and similar behavior does not track shared ancestry. Subspecies fared no better. As of 2012, three were recognized: V. m. mandarinia, V. m. magnifica and V. m. nobilis. The name japonica has not been valid since 1997. A 2020 revision removed subspecies rankings entirely, leaving japonica, magnifica and nobilis as informal names for different color forms.
Genetics now backs up the family tree. The mitochondrial genome provided by Chen and colleagues in 2015 helped confirm the place of the Vespidae family within the Vespoidea superfamily, and that Vespoidea is monophyletic.
The stinger of the Asian giant hornet is typically 6 mm long, and it injects a large amount of potent venom. Part of the punch comes from mastoparans, cytolytic peptides found in many bee and wasp venoms. They damage tissue by stimulating phospholipase action, and the venom also brings its own phospholipase. It holds a neurotoxin too, a single-chain polypeptide with a molecular weight around 20 kDa.
A single hornet cannot inject a lethal dose. Multiple stings, however, can kill even people who are not allergic if the total dose is high enough. Allergy to the venom greatly increases the risk of death.
Tests on mice rated the venom's lethality at 4.0 mg/kg, which falls short of the deadliest wasp venom. That title goes to V. luctuosa at 1.6 mg/kg. The danger of the mandarinia sting comes mainly from the sheer volume of venom delivered.
A report from Japan in 2020 described long-term damage after venom was apparently sprayed into a person's eyes. The extent of the visual impairment remains unassessed. Hornets seem able to spray venom this way only under certain circumstances.
Allergic patients cannot count on a shortcut. Evidence is insufficient to believe that immunotherapy against the venom of other Vespidae would prevent a reaction to this venom, because the chemistry differs widely.
The fear is old. In 1957, van der Vecht formed the impression that humans in the native range lived in constant fear of the hornet. In 1976, Iwata reported that its attacks hampered both research and removal.
In a study of 31 nests, 25 were found around rotten pine roots. Another study found only 9 of 56 nests above ground. Unlike other Vespa species, this hornet almost exclusively inhabits subterranean nests, and aerial nesting is described as extremely rare. Rodents, snakes or other burrowing animals dug some of the tunnels. Depths range from 6.0 to 60 cm, and the surface entrance runs from 2.0 to 60 cm, whether horizontal, inclined or vertical. Queens that found a nest prefer narrow cavities.
Inside, a nest typically lacks a developed envelope. Early on, the envelope has the shape of an inverted bowl. As the colony grows, one to three rough sheets of comb appear. Single primordial combs are often built at the same time and then fused into one. A nest usually holds four to seven combs, joined by one main pillar and secondary pillars. The top comb is abandoned after summer and left to rot. One of the largest measured 49.5 by 45.5 cm with 1,192 cells. Another, wrapped around a root system, was elliptical and measured 61.0 by 48.0 cm.
Queens emerge from hibernation in early to mid-April and feed on the sap of oak trees. V. mandarinia dominates the other hornets and gets the premium sap sources. Among the queens there is a dominance hierarchy. The top-ranked queen feeds while the others form a circle around her. Then the second-ranked queen feeds, and so on, until the last queen feeds at a poor hour.
By late April, inseminated queens begin searching for nesting sites. Uninseminated queens do not, because their ovaries never fully develop. They keep feeding until they disappear in early July. Parasites can produce the same fate. In a study of Vespa parasites, 4.3% of V. mandarinia females carried the strepsipteran Xenos moutoni. Parasitized queens cannot reproduce and follow the path of uninseminated queens. No males were parasitized at all.
An inseminated queen starts with relatively small cells and raises around 40 small workers. Workers do not begin working outside until July. The queen takes part in outside activity until mid-July, then stays in the nest and leaves that work to the workers. By early August, a fully developed nest holds three combs with 500 cells and 100 workers. After mid-September no more eggs are laid, and the focus shifts to caring for larvae. The queens die in late October.
Around the queen, workers form a "royal court" that licks and bites her and so ingests her pheromones. Whether those pheromones then pass on to other workers is speculation, with no direct evidence. The hornets also use sound. Hungry larvae scrape their mandibles against the cell walls. Adults click their mandibles to warn off creatures that encroach on their territory. For navigation, both chemical and visual cues matter. Hornets with damaged antennae still found their way, and they failed only when their vision was impaired.
Males appear in mid-September and new queens in mid-October. Their body color grows intense, and the queens gain about 20% in weight. Once they leave the nest, they do not return. Males wait outside the entrance until the queens emerge, then intercept them in midair, bring them to the ground and copulate for 8 to 45 seconds. The males return to the entrance for another chance. Up to 65% of queens fight off the males and leave unfertilized, at least for the moment. Mated queens leave to hibernate, and prehibernating queens are found in moist, subterranean habitats.
Once males and new queens emerge, workers turn from protein and animal foods to carbohydrates. The last of those sexed individuals to emerge may die of starvation.
A single Asian giant hornet can kill as many as 40 honey bees per minute, striking and decapitating them with its large mandibles. A lone scout, sometimes two or three, approaches a hive cautiously and releases pheromones to lead its nestmates there. The bees' stings are ineffective, since the hornets are five times their size and heavily armored. Fewer than 50 hornets can wipe out a colony of tens of thousands of bees in a few hours. Hornets can fly up to 100 km in a day, at speeds up to 40 km/h.
Mantises are favored targets in late summer and fall, when they supply key protein for queen and drone larvae. The wider menu covers medium to large insects such as bees, other hornet and wasp species, beetles and hornworms. The hornets raid colonies of other Vespa species, with V. simillima the usual victim, as well as Vespula species and hives of Apis cerana and Apis mellifera. They take adults, pupae and larvae to feed their own young. Sometimes they cannibalize each other's colonies. Because prey can include crop pests, the hornets are sometimes regarded as beneficial.
Adult hornets can only drink the juices of their victims. Workers chew prey into a paste for the larvae, which, unlike the adults, can digest solid protein. Workers dismember bodies and carry home only the most nutrient-rich parts, such as flight muscles. In return, the larvae secrete a clear liquid, sometimes called Vespa amino acid mixture, to feed adults on demand.
V. mandarinia is the only social wasp known to apply a scent that directs its colony to a food source. The chemical comes from the sixth sternal gland, also known as van der Vecht's gland. The behavior appears during autumn raids, once the hornets hunt in groups instead of alone. It may have arisen because the hornet depends so heavily on honey bee colonies.
A lone hornet cannot take on a well-defended colony of Apis cerana. The bees swarm one hornet and vibrate their thoracic muscles to heat it and raise carbon dioxide to a lethal level. The Japanese honey bee, Apis cerana japonica, has a sharper trap. When a scout approaches, she emits hunting pheromones. About 100 bees gather near the entrance and keep it open, which lets the hornet in. A mob of hundreds then wraps her in a ball. The bees vibrate their flight muscles, as they do to warm the hive in cold weather, and the temperature in the ball reaches 46 degrees Celsius. The bees tolerate up to 50 degrees even with raised carbon dioxide, but the hornet cannot survive both. Some bees die with the intruder. Killing the scout prevents her from summoning reinforcements that would destroy the colony.
Beekeepers in Japan tried introducing western honey bees because of their high productivity. Those bees have no innate defense against the hornets. Infection with Kakugo virus may offer an outside form of protection. Detailed research suggests the ball-of-bees account is incomplete. Honey bees and hornets may be developing ways to avoid costly, mutually unprofitable conflict. When bees spot a scout, they send an "I see you" signal that commonly warns the predator off.
In an experiment with four Vespa species, V. mandarinia was dominant on every measure. At sap flows, it fought other insects in 57 separate fights and lost only one, to Neope goschkevitschii. That gives a win rate of 98.3%. Cities tell the same story. Extremely urbanized areas are a refuge for V. analis, but V. mandarinia, its predator, is entirely absent.
Few natural enemies trouble the hornet. Colonies of its own species attack its nests, crested honey buzzards may prey on it, and mantises have been known to kill it. It is also a pollinator. It visits the obligate plant parasite Mitrastemon yamamotoi, and it is among the most common pollinators of Musella lasiocarpa in Yunnan Province, China.
In August 2019, three hornets were found in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, and a large nest was found and destroyed soon afterward. A worker was reported in Blaine, Washington, at the end of September, another in October and a third in December. The first confirmed sightings centered on the Vancouver area, with nests also found in neighboring Whatcom County, Washington.
Single specimens kept turning up through 2020. One came from Langley, British Columbia, about 8 mi north of Blaine, and another from Custer, Washington, 9 mi southeast. A queen was seen near Bellingham in June. An unmated queen was trapped near Birch Bay in July, and a male was captured in Custer that same month.
In October 2020, the Washington State Department of Agriculture announced a nest 8.3 ft above ground in a tree cavity in Blaine. Dozens of hornets were entering and leaving. The nest was eradicated the next day, with about 100 hornets removed on the spot. The landowner first required the nest to be returned and advertised it for sale. A local beekeeper bought it and gave it to the state entomology team. Analysis showed about 500 live specimens, including about 200 queens. Some went to the Smithsonian Institution for the permanent cryogenic collection of its NMNH Biorepository.
Officials believed more live nests existed in Washington, because captures at Birch Bay, Blaine and Custer lay far from the one they found. A Canadian official said hornets in Canada seemed confined to areas near the border, with Washington at the center of the invasion. In November 2020, one hornet was found in Abbotsford and a queen in Aldergrove, both in British Columbia. In August 2021, another nest turned up near Blaine, only 2 mi from the 2020 nest. It was destroyed two weeks later, on the 25th of August, before it could produce new queens. Two more nests followed in September, along with a potential sighting near Everson, some 25 mi east of Blaine.
Mitochondrial DNA analysis revealed where the hornets came from. The British Columbia and Washington populations differed as much as the native Chinese, Japanese and Korean populations differ from one another. The 2019 specimens traced to two maternal populations, Japanese in British Columbia and South Korean in Washington. That points to two separate introductions within about 50 mi of each other, a few months apart.
In June 2021, a dead, desiccated male was found near Marysville, in Snohomish County, Washington. Its more reddish color form suggested yet another source. The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service confirmed a third, unrelated population. A male in June was perplexing, since the earliest male emergence in 2020 was July. Its dried-out state indicates it had emerged in a previous year.
In April 2020, authorities in Washington asked the public to report sightings, warning that the hornets "could decimate bee populations in the United States and establish such a deep presence that all hope for eradication could be lost." The WSDA launched a "full-scale hunt". Two models suggested the hornets could spread north into coastal British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, and south as far as southern Oregon. The USDA's Agricultural Research Service worked on lures and attractants and on molecular genetics. Congress considered specific eradication legislation in 2020, and British Columbia Agriculture prepared for a "long fight" lasting years. One advantage for humans was the low diversity of the invading population, which left the hornets less prepared for new challenges.
The projected costs show why. If the hornet settled all suitable habitats in North America, control in the United States would cost over 113.7 million US dollars per year, possibly far more. Bee products would bring in about 11.98 million dollars less per year, give or take 0.64 million. Bee-pollinated crops would yield 101.8 million dollars less. New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, North Carolina, New Jersey and Virginia would suffer most. New England would be worst hit, and could become by far the greatest concentration of the hornet in the world. Alfalfa and other hays, apples, grapes, tobacco, cotton and blueberries would be the crops hardest hit.
In December 2022, the WSDA announced no confirmed sightings that year. It said the same in December 2023. In December 2024, it declared the hornets eradicated from North America. The last confirmed sightings had come in 2021.
In Korea, the hornet's name means "general giant wasp", and in Taiwan it is called "giant tiger head bee". After its discovery in North America, scientific literature and government sources kept the established name, Asian giant hornet. Mainstream media preferred the nickname "murder hornet". Sensationalist outlets in Japan had been giving the wasp a nickname of their own since at least 2008.
In July 2022, the Entomological Society of America said it would adopt the common name northern giant hornet. Its stated reason was to avoid potentially discriminatory language, citing xenophobia and racism related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Within two days of the first news report in 2020, insect identification centers in the Eastern United States began getting requests. The wasp has never occurred in that region. The centers were swamped for months, yet not one of the thousands of submitted photos or samples showed V. mandarinia. Most were wasps such as the European hornet, the eastern cicada killer or the southern yellowjacket.
People also sent in bees, sawflies, horntails, wasp-mimicking flies, beetles, Jerusalem crickets and cicadas. One submission was a plastic children's toy that looked like a wasp. Laypeople routinely estimated all of these at 130-185% of their actual size.
Reports from other parts of the world appear to be mistakes too. They seem to involve other introduced hornets, such as V. orientalis in several locations and V. velutina in Europe.
Crushing hornets with flat-headed wooden sticks is one way to fight them. Hornets do not counterattack while hunting bees or attacking a hive, the phase called the "slaughter". They guard a hive aggressively once the defenders are dead and the hornets have moved in. The biggest cost of beating is time, so the process is inefficient.
Applying poison or fire at night is an effective way to destroy a colony. Finding a subterranean nest is the hard part. The usual method gives a wasp a piece of frog or fish meat attached to a cotton ball and follows it home. With V. mandarinia this is difficult, because its common home flight radius is 1 to 2 km, and it travels up to 8 km from the nest. For the rare nest in a tree, workers wrap the tree in plastic and vacuum the hornets out.
Bait traps can be placed in apiaries. Their compartments steer a hornet into a one-way hole, and honey bees escape through a mesh that the larger wasps cannot pass. Baits include a diluted millet jelly solution or a crude sugar solution mixed with intoxicants, vinegar or fruit essence. The WSDA used plastic bottle traps baited with fruit juice and added alcohol. The alcohol repels bees but not V. mandarinia, which reduces bycatch.
Mass poisoning with malathion has also been proposed. Hornets at an apiary are captured and fed a poisoned sugar solution or a poisoned bee, and the toxin is expected to spread through trophallaxis. The method is good in principle but has not been tested extensively.
Traps fixed to hive entrances are meant to catch hornets while letting bees escape. A hornet that grabs a bee and flies upward enters a capture chamber and is left to die. Some find a way out through the front, so these traps can be very inefficient. Protective screens exploit the fact that resisted hornets lose the urge to attack and retreat. Weeds, wire, fishing nets or narrowed passages that only bees can use all serve as resistance. Experienced hornets catch on, however, and wait on the screens for bees. The best control combines screens with traps.
Some Japanese beekeepers place glue traps, like those used for mice, on top of the bees' artificial nesting box, with a disarmed giant hornet stuck to the glue. The struggling hornet draws in more hornets who try to help, and they get trapped too.
The hornet is common in Japan, where it prefers rural areas with trees to nest in, and some people eat it. In certain Japanese mountain villages, nests are excavated and the larvae are considered a delicacy when fried. In the central Chubu region, the wasps are sometimes eaten as snacks or used in drinks. The grubs are often kept in jars, pan-fried or steamed with rice for a savory dish called hebo-gohan or hebo-meshi. Adults are fried on skewers with the stinger still attached, until the body turns crunchy.
Hunting wasp nests was historically a social activity in that region, which helped establish wasp harvesting as cultural heritage. The Kushihara Hebo Matsuri, a festival celebrating wasp-based cuisine, marks that tradition. Asian giant hornets are also cultivated in Nagaland and Manipur, in eastern India.
Updated
Common questions
How big is the Asian giant hornet?
The Asian giant hornet is the largest hornet in the world, with a body length of 45 mm and a wingspan around 75 mm. Queens can exceed 50 mm, while workers measure between 35 and 40 mm.
Why is the Asian giant hornet called the murder hornet?
Mainstream media used the nickname murder hornet after the Asian giant hornet was found in North America. In July 2022, the Entomological Society of America adopted the name northern giant hornet, citing xenophobia and racism related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Has the Asian giant hornet been eradicated from North America?
Yes. The Washington State Department of Agriculture declared the Asian giant hornet eradicated from North America in December 2024. The first sightings came in 2019, and the last confirmed sightings were in 2021.
How dangerous is an Asian giant hornet sting?
The Asian giant hornet has a 6 mm stinger that injects a large amount of potent venom. A single hornet cannot inject a lethal dose, but multiple stings can kill even people who are not allergic.
What does the Asian giant hornet eat?
The Asian giant hornet hunts medium to large insects, including bees, other hornets and wasps, beetles and mantises. A single hornet can kill as many as 40 honey bees per minute.
Where does the Asian giant hornet build its nest?
The Asian giant hornet almost exclusively nests underground. In a study of 31 nests, 25 were found around rotten pine roots, and nest depths ranged from 6.0 to 60 cm.
Do people eat the Asian giant hornet?
Yes, in parts of Japan. In some mountain villages and in the central Chubu region, the larvae are fried or steamed with rice in a dish called hebo-gohan, and the Kushihara Hebo Matsuri celebrates wasp-based cuisine.
All sources
126 references cited across the entry
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- 110p.48, "V. soror du Buysson 1905 was described as a variety of V. ducalis Smith, 1852, despite the structural characteristics of the vertex and apical margin of the clypeus being similar to V. magnific
- 111p.48–49, "V. mandarinia and V. soror cannot be satisfactory separated by structural characteristics but are readily separated by colour characteristics: 1. Third to the sixth gastral terga in the fema
- 112p.51–52, "The queens usually select underground cavities as nest sites. The cavities are either associated with rotten tree roots or are made by small vertebrates such as moles and snakes. The cavitie
- 113p.52, "The queen builds a comb of about 44 cells (range 37–60) with a mean cell building rate per day of 1.64 (range 0–4) and a mean egg laying rate per day of 1.53 (range 0–5). The envelope is bowl-s
- 114p.1693, "A hornet (Vespa mandarinia) neurotoxin, mandaratoxin (MDTX)"
- 115p.1696, "Estimations of the molecular weight of purified MDTX in its reduced and unreduced forms with denaturing solvents and its molecular weight in the native form are nearly the same. It is conclud
- 116p.2, "The abundance of V. mandarinia is positively associated with amounts of green spaces in urban landscapes, suggesting that the control of their populations should be focused on urban green areas.
- 117p.4-6: Figure 2B, Figure 3A, Figure 3C, Figure 4 Supplemental #2: Table S5
- 118p.7, "Here we have estimated an annual projected loss of US$113.7 million per year. However, the costs associated with control actions not included in our study may eventually increase these amounts s
- 119p.1, "If this species spread across the country, it could threaten 95 216 ± 5551 honey bee colonies, threatening an estimated income of US$ ... 101.8 million for ... bee-pollinated crops production ..
- 120p.4-7: Figure 2, §3.2 Threatened colonies, §3.3 Hive products potential losses, §3.4 Threatened bee-pollinated croplands, Figure 4, Figure 5 Supplemental #2: Table S5, Table S6 (mislabeled S5), Table
- 121p.5, "We also identified that alfalfa/hay, apples, grapes and tobacco are the crops with the largest threatened areas of 58 484.1, 522.9, 468.5 and 432.9 km2, respectively (Table S8)." Supplemental #2
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