The Daily - The Arrival of the ‘Murder Hornet’

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

It came to the United States from Asia and first appeared in Washington State. The country was slow to recognize it. Deaths mounted as it circulated for weeks undetected. And now, if it’s not stopped, it could reshape populations and industries across the country. Today, we discuss the arrival of the Asian giant hornet. Guest: Mike Baker, a Pacific Northwest correspondent for The New York Times who spoke with Ted McFall, a beekeeper in Washington State. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: The Asian giant hornet can kill humans with its stings. It also decapitates bees methodically. If the hornets spread across the United States and devastate bee populations, which we depend on for one out of every three bites of food we eat, our food supply could be threatened.Although the Asian giant hornet kills honeybees in their hives, some bees have developed a remarkable defense: cooking the hornets alive.

yeah so my name is ted mcfall i live in the pacific northwest uh northern washington and i am a hobby beekeeper i've been a beekeeper my whole life i grew up in a beekeeping family my father's kept bees and so i'm very familiar with all things related to bees so on a typical day of beekeeping, I'll usually wait until around midday. Well, what I'll do is I'll just open up the hive. I'll puff them with some smoke, which calms them down. And then I just go through the hives and see what each individual colony needs. Whenever they're cranky, sometimes I talk to them and they're trying to sting me. And I do, I talk to them, I say, hey, what's going on do i talk to them i say hey what's going on why are you so upset say hey you know is your queen doing okay is your queen here

because sometimes the queen gets sick or somebody happens to the queen and that makes them cranky or i'm like you know is a predator messing with you guys or you know basically i talk to them i know that they don't understand what i'm saying. So I guess really it's more of talking to myself. Yeah. And it is kind of funny whenever I'm going through the hide, because a lot of times I do see all their little, their little eyes all lined up along the top bars staring at me. So sometimes I do feel like I have thousands of eyes staring at me at once

whenever I'm going through their home. I know that maybe that's a little bit of a, some kind of romanticized idea of beekeeping, but sometimes I feel like maybe they do kind of recognize me and they know, okay, it's this guy again. So one morning in November of last year in northern Washington state, Ted McFall gets out of bed

and he's going to go check on his hives. It was a typical morning. I made something to eat. I got all my stuff together and I was just planning to go do a typical hive inspection. So I went and I got my smoker and my bee equipment, my bee suit. Then I put everything in my pickup truck and I went to the bee yard. And as I drove into the bee yard, I could see from afar kind of a dark shadow in front of one of my beehives. And I thought, oh, I wonder what that is. And before he even gets out of the truck, he can see that something's wrong. And as I drove closer, I noticed that those were bee bodies.

There were thousands of bee bodies strewn all over the ground in front of the beehive. And as I looked at the ground where all the dead bees were, I noticed that they were all decapitated. Each of their heads has been removed from their bodies.

I opened up the beehive and I looked inside and it was just more carnage inside the beehive. There were just bees chopped up left and right. There were beehives everywhere. It was hard for me to believe that something like that had happened without the bees being able to mount any sort of a defense. that something like that had happened without the bees being able to mount any sort of a defense. Because if they're attacked by another predator, most of the time, or I shouldn't say most of the time, all the time, they're able to mount a defense and kill a certain amount of the attackers. However, in this case, there was not one attacker to be found. That was just something that I could not believe.

I mean, I have been a beekeeper for so many years, and I've never seen anything like it. So he takes some pictures, he sends them to his dad. And I was going to say, hey, look at this. Do you have any ideas what the heck this could have been? And he was totally bewildered also. So I took all the bee bodies and I just took them to the woods and I dumped all their little severed bodies and cleaned up my equipment and brought it home. And so needless to say, it bugged me for a few weeks after that, you know, thinking what

the heck happened. And I just thought, well, you know, maybe, maybe it was zombies. I have no idea what could have caused this crazy thing. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. It came to the U.S. from Asia and first appeared in Washington state. The country was slow to recognize it.

And now, if it's not stopped, it could reshape the country. Mike Baker on the Asian giant hornets. It's Friday, May 8th. Mike, what are these insects, and where did they come from? So they've earned the nickname the murder hornet, but really they're known as the Asian giant hornet. And they usually live in Asia. That's where they have developed the nickname because they are a voracious consumer of honeybees. They're known as an insect that can spot a colony of honeybees, mark it with a pheromone, you know, a kind of an odor that can draw them back there. Then that, you know, that forager will go back to its nest and get a backup crew to go and target

the hive. And then the attack begins. And what are the mechanics of this attack once this crew heads off to the hive? So it's a pretty brutal scene. These hornets are so big and they've got mandibles or essentially their jaws on the front of them are enormous compared to the bees. And so the attack can be pretty swift.

They can kill thousands of them in just a few hours. Each one of the hornets can kill a bee every 14 seconds because one of their main ways to make this happen is just to decapitate the bees. That's their goal. Why? Why decapitate the bees. That's their goal. Why? Why decapitate them? What they're really after here is the part of the bee known as the thorax, essentially the bee's chest.

And they're going to take that component back to their nest and use it to feed their young. I mean, that's really a signature of one of their attacks is you look inside one of these hives and all the bees are dead and their bodies are split apart and the honey's been left behind. They ignore the honey altogether. Exactly. And how did these giant Asian hornets actually get from Asia to the United States? Well, they didn't fly here. There's a lot of open questions about how it happened. I think the most in the spring to basically start the creation of a new colony.

So did one of these queens, you know, end up at the bottom of a ship somewhere where there was enough dirt for them to establish themselves? Or do they go into the base of the right bonsai tree that was going to come across the ocean and get sold at some nursery somewhere? That seems like the theory most likely to the researchers who are following this. So it's the kind of pregnant hornet travel theory. Yeah, that's right. But what we do know is that around November of last year, we started to get these indicators of the hornet here in the United States. And we heard the story of Ted McFall where his hive gets wiped out in mysterious ways. And then just a few weeks after that, a couple miles away,

there's a guy who walks out onto his porch one morning, letting his dog out. And he looks down and immediately has a jarring fear because he sees the largest hornet he's ever seen in his life. Wow. Right there, right there, right there. Right in the edge of that wing. Look at that.

And he's initially scared, but also realizes it's just lying there. It looks to be dead. And he starts to poke around and look at it a little more closely. And he starts to poke around and look at it a little more closely. And as luck would have it, he had watched a YouTube video once about the Asian giant hornet. Giant hornet, 100%. You got one? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Hold on a second.

Dude, you got it. Got it. So he has a hunch that this might be an Asian giant hornet. I mean, it didn't make sense to him at the time because they're not in the United States. They wouldn't be here. But, you know, he just had enough of a hunch that he wanted to pursue it. And it ended up getting all the way to the state and their invasive species specialists come by and go, yeah, it actually is. It's the Asian giant hornet. It's here for the first time ever. Huh. So this kind of random man on the street, man on the stoop, happens to have seen the right YouTube video and then sees this hornet in his yard, notifies the authorities, and there you go. First official sighting in the U.S.

You got it. Thank God for YouTube, finally. Finally. So what happens once these invasive species specialists realize what they're dealing with? Well, so this first one was in December. And around that same time, there was another person in the area that had found a second one of these hornets. So there's now been two of these worker hornets that have been discovered. But then because it's December, these worker hornets are dying off just as part of their natural cycle. And the queens are going off to find somewhere to hibernate for winter. So there's no longer a great way for the state

to commit a bunch of resources to track these things down. They can't really catch these hornets in the winter. Right, now all of a sudden they're sitting, waiting for spring to arrive. And what happens in the spring? So this is really the time that the queens are going to start emerging from hibernation. They're going to start flying around looking for a new patch of dirt to start creating a nest, building a new colony, developing a whole new network of worker hornets that are going to spend the summer foraging throughout the region. And murdering honeybees.

More of that, too. Right. So now's the moment. I mean, now's the chance where this window is open to start catching queens, tracking them down, to stop them from establishing a new nest. And it's really a chance to stop these before it's too late. We'll be right back.

I do have a, I have a hornet suit in the car, actually. We had to buy specials. Oh, you did? Oh, really? Like extra thick or something? So Mike, now we're here. It's the spring, this critical moment to try to stop the murderous hornets. How are the authorities in Washington trying to do that? So I got a chance a couple weeks ago to go out with Chris Looney, who's the state entomologist,

who's really the guy leading the war being waged against the hornets right now. It's social distancing time, so I put on my mask that had some cartoon bees on it. So are you making these, basically? Yeah, basically. We meet at this forest edge, and he's making traps out of clear fruit jugs, essentially. The regular wasp traps would be too small for the hornet to even fit in, so they're making those. Yeah, we just made them out of these juice containers that we bought in Golden.

You know, really trying a variety of strategies here to entice some of these hornets to get stuck. We either put a half a cup of orange juice and rice wine in it, so basically the grossest mimosa on Earth for the hornets to to get stuck we either put a half a cup of orange juice and rice wine in it so basically the grossest mimosa on earth for the hornets or uh this one is a kefir and water blend it's a fermented milk protein is essentially what we're going to get you chris was very kind to bring some specimens along to show what these things look like. He had a bunch of them in a little jar. Here's the hornets if you want to look at them. It's like a, you know, it's a

chunky baby carrot. It's a huge thing. The queens will get up to two inches. That's a wingspan that's almost like, that's a wing like a dragonfly almost. You know, it's got tiger stripes down the back and its face is large enough to appear at almost you know it's got tiger stripes down the back and its face is large enough to appear at in person and it's got the spider-man teardrop eyes and a

really sort of ferocious look it's just a it's a really striking sight to see them i feel like it's going to come alive sounds like it looks like a nasty murdering hornet that sounds like a nasty, murdering hornet. That sounds like a good description. So how is the trap supposed to work? To be able to track them back to where they are. You know, let them back out of the jug and follow them back to their nest. Because, you know, it's not that great to kill just one of these hornets. You want to be able to find the source and kill them all.

And what's the plan for what happens when a nest is found? So the ideal situation, you find one, you come back at nighttime when you know all the hornets are cooped up inside and you can go in and go on the attack. You know, I talked to this one guy in Vancouver Island in British Columbia who had the job of doing just that, going out in the middle of the night and trying to eradicate this nest that they had found. He puts on his shorts and then thick sweatpants. And then on top of that, his bee suit. He's got Kevlar around his wrists and ankles. I mean, he's ready. He's prepared. He's ready for battle. But as he's approaching the nest, I mean, he's rustling through the bushes

and he's got a flashlight on his head and, you know, something about all that awakens the hive and some of them start emerging. Uh-oh. and some of them start emerging. Uh-oh. And just as he is about to douse the nest with carbon dioxide, he feels those first searing stabs in his leg, through the bee suit, through the sweatpants,

the thick sweatpants that he has. And he gets stung seven times, some of them drawing blood even through the bee suit. And he tells me that it essentially feels like red hot thumbtacks that are being driven into his flesh.

He wakes up the next day and his legs are aching like he has the flu. You know, he's been a beekeeper and done that kind of work for many years. He's been stung thousands of times. And he says these stings were the most painful he's ever experienced. Mike, what happens if this eradication effort you're describing just doesn't work? So one thing is Western Washington is a bit of an ideal habitat for the Asian giant hornet. I mean, it's got plenty of woods for it to establish itself, lots of nice dirt. The Hornet doesn't do great in high altitudes or really dry plains. So there's a lot of concern that ride to the right place in Colorado or the South or the Northeast, I mean, it could quickly establish itself there as well. And there's a window here to

contain and eradicate the hornet in the next year or two. And if they have enough time and space to spread over that time period without getting wiped out, I mean, that would essentially be the end of it. Then it's just more of a containment as opposed to an eradication strategy. And how bad a situation would that be for the United States? I'm mindful that one of the reasons this story has attracted so much attention is that honeybees are this important part of our ecosystem. So a murderous invader seems really threatening to that. But as you've mentioned, these hornets have been in Japan for a really long time, and it's not like their ecosystems have collapsed. Right. It's a part of normal life there. But there is one real important difference. And that is, over time, the Japanese honeybees have evolved strategy of teamwork that involves surrounding the hornet

and staying surrounded as a ball. So many of them that you can't even see the hornet anymore. Wow. They flex their muscles essentially like they're flying and produce a constant heat that essentially turns their little ball into a tiny oven. And over the span of 10 minutes, then 20 minutes, then 30 minutes, and it gets warmer and warmer and warmer, the hornet eventually gets cooked to death. Wow. Unfortunately, the European honeybees, the Western honeybees that we have, they're the most popular pollinators here in the United States. The researchers have looked into whether they have the same instinct, whether they have the same ability to fight back, and they don't. So the honeybees in the U.S., they would be pretty defenseless for, I mean, in terms of evolution, a really long time.

It seems likely that if these things are going to start targeting a variety of hives in the United States, it's just going to be massacre after massacre after massacre. after massacre, after massacre. A lot of people don't realize it, but one third of every bite that you take is dependent on honeybees. So much of food would not be pollinated without honeybees. If you like apples, well, guess what? A honeybee pollinated that. Do you like nuts? Well, guess what? A bee pollinated that. Do you like avocados? A bee pollinated that.

There's so much that our bees pollinate. Actually, even they help pollinate alfalfa, which helps feed livestock. I mean, bees do so much for us that people don't really realize it. But if the bees find themselves in trouble, then humanity will find itself in trouble. The only thing that we have going for us right now is the fact that it is over here in the corner of the United States. So we have it a little bit isolated.

If we can get rid of them right now, there's still hope. It's basically a now or never situation. If we don't deal with it now, then it's going to spread over the entire United States. Mike, I'm curious how you're thinking about this story, especially because for the past two or three months, you have done almost nothing but write about the coronavirus pandemic. Yeah, I mean, it was my task there early on in the outbreak here in Seattle area to report on the emergence of the virus, the nursing home where so many people died early on, and then continued to report and watch as it spread elsewhere across the country. And, you know, I took the opportunity for this story about the Hornets as a bit of a break from that,

as a bit of a reprieve. And in some ways thought it was just an interesting quirk of something that's happening here and thought it would just be you know what one-off story you know go out do this interesting thing it's a curiosity but nothing major but instead you know in the process of reporting you also had this sense of the uncanny parallels here here I am reporting again, and something that's come in from Asia lands in Washington state first. You know, we have just a couple cases here. There's just a couple of them now, but it's potentially poised to spread much further. And, I've sort of been processing that, the story, once it got published, took off in ways that I totally did not anticipate. And I've been trying to make sense of that too. Why are all these people from all over the country emailing me

their photos of the various insects they've just found in their backyard. Is this the murder hornet? Is this the one here? Is it in my county? Is it in my state? And so I get the sense of others around the country, consciously or not, are seeing the same parallels of this threat that has arrived and an opportunity to stop it. And as our lives are consumed by coronavirus, that we, you know, we didn't prevent it from spreading. You know, in this case, we're almost back at the beginning of that story and a chance to get it right.

Right, we didn't stop the coronavirus. But perhaps we can stop the hornets. And that would be something. That would be... That would be great. Well, Mike, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Thank you. Michael Flynn, President Trump's first national security advisor, who had pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his communications with Russia. We are both obviously relieved and gratified

that we have an attorney general and other attorneys in the Department of Justice now with enough integrity to bring the truth to light. The decision, which was celebrated by Flynn's lawyer on Fox, came after newly revealed documents suggested that the FBI agents lacked the proper justification to interview Flynn in the first place. I felt it was going to happen just by watching and seeing like everybody else does. He was an innocent man. Asked about the decision at the White House, President Trump immediately praised it and congratulated Flynn. So I'm very happy for General Flynn. He was a great warrior and he still is a great warrior. Now in my book, he's an even greater warrior. And another 3.2 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, bringing the total

number since the start of the pandemic to more than 33 million. In many states, officials say that more than a quarter of the workforce is now unemployed. The Daily is made by Lindsay Garrison, Annie Brown, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowan, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Lee Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Mark George, Luke Vanderploeg, Adiza Egan, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu Yanasambandhan, MJ Davis-Lynn, Austin Mitchell, Sayer Kaveto, Nina Patuk, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper,

Daniel Guimet, Hans Butow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoit, Bianca Gaver, and Asta Chaturvedi. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, and Nora Keller. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.