“Exterminate? That’s a bad word to use. Exterminate. Get this guy. Watch out we don’t exterminate you.”
–Clemenza, “The Godfather”
Bring back the condor! Eradicate the boll weevil! Feed the monarch butterfly! Turn nutria rodents into game animals!
There is a rationale to these supposed conflicting remarks. The human species, or at least most of us, understand the difference between an endangered species and an invasive species. Which is why some of us in Arkansas would like to bring back the red wolf but don’t mind shooting feral hogs any time of the year. We plant milkweed. Yet kudzu is a cuss word.
When the boll weevil was eradicated (or declared so) throughout the southern United States a few years ago, the effort was celebrated as one of the most successful “pest management” operations ever. We doubt the boll weevils saw it that way. But then, they were the invaders. Nobody asked them here.
Same with the murder hornet.
While most of the buzz this past week had to do with drones in the eastern part of the country, in the Pacific Northwest the humans have won a war against the murder hornet, aka Vespa mandarinia. The nickname “murder hornet” came back in 2013 when the insects killed 42 people in China and seriously injured 1,675.
They showed up on these shores in 2019. Specifically in Washington state near the Canadian border. Agricultural types were worried because these insects–which can grow up to two inches long–not only sting like the dickens but can take out a whole honey bee hive in a matter of hours. (It’s not clear how the murder hornets made the trip from Asia to Washington state, but the best guesses include hitching a ride in potted plants or in shipping containers, according to CNN.)
Dispatches from the front say traps–not dissimilar to those used to trap boll weevils down this way–were baited and used to see where the hornets traveled about. And those traps have not been, uh, “sprung” in several years. Which makes the eradication official. Or at least officially official for officialdom. There still might be a hive or two here and there, and probably are, but there aren’t enough hornets to cause a problem any more. Which is close enough to “eradication” for government work.
“I’ve gotta tell you, as an entomologist–I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects,” Sven-Erik Spichiger, pest program manager of the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told a virtual news conference, as reported by CNN.
This particular eradication really should be celebrated, even if there may be a fan of the murder hornet in entomology classes here and there. For murder hornets are nasty critters. They approach native bee hives, dismember all the bees therein, and use the hives as their own. According to The Washington Post, they decapitate local bees, “feeding the leftover thoraxes to their young.” One beekeeper quoted by The Post says that the decapitation and the thorax feeding are “really, really bad for honeybees.” We might have added an extra really.
And honeybees, as we know, not only give us honey, but are responsible for pollinating 80 percent of the world’s flowering plants. Somebody said insects, mostly bees, are responsible for nearly 1/3 of human food supply. They need their thoraxes and humans need them to keep buzzing.
Sorry, murder hornet; it was you or us.
Credit: Source link
