Thanks Stephen for this.
You can imagine I would be keen on any help to combat Vespa velutina which is threatening Europe.
I am hoping for something more rapid coming through. Specific attractant? Releasing sterile males?
Thanks Stephen for this.
You can imagine I would be keen on any help to combat Vespa velutina which is threatening Europe.
I am hoping for something more rapid coming through. Specific attractant? Releasing sterile males?
a french garden 
I think there is already a lot of promising research surrounding the Yellow-legged Asian Hornet. We already know that a local native Conopid fly has taken to parasitising them; although they have spread rapidly their numbers have not increased to the extent that was predicted; we already know that their genetic line is very narrow ie they are descended from a very small number of original imports and are beginning to display behaviour that is not to their survival advantage. I think there are much greater, but less visible, threats to honey bees that would be more worthy of research support. Personally, of the species offered up for voting, I’d be voting for either the Daubentons Bat or the Giant Hogweed projects. Sequencing their genomes seem much more likely to lead to interesting useful things, albeit unrelated to honey bees. Spoken as a non-beekeeper of course. I don’t have to witness my hives being attacked.
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I am not aware of any promising research concerning the Asian Hornet. I did see one study about the lack of diversity but it was only based on 20 nests all taken from the same area and so not a wide enough or large enough sample. However, lack of genetic diversity can in rare cases result in improved fitness after a bottleneck in the population if any deleterious genes have been deleted, leading to a greater fitness. If you think of genetic fitness being measured by the number of healthy adults being produced by by an organism going onto produce more healthy adults, then the Asian Hornet is very genetically fit and shows no signs of reduced fitness – so far. I’d be very interested in hearing about the Conopid fly. Amelia
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I voted for the bat and the wasp, thanks for sending this along.
bonnie in provence
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I thought you were only to vote for one species but I suppose no one is checking. I am a bat fan too. Amelia
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Yes, a specific attractant would be helpful–then you could handle your hornets how we deal with yellow jackets–traps set early in spring to prevent nearby colonies.
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The attractant is the only thing that might make a dent in the population. In the U.K. they have managed to destroy the nests by employing heat seeking equipment in areas that have had hornet sightings. The problem is finding nests in the summer in the trees which is virtually impossible without this. I do not know how costly this equipment is but it could help in France. Amelia
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