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Asian Giant Hornets Kill 42 People In China, Injure Over 1,500
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Madison Park and Dayu Zhang report on CNN that swarms of aggressive hornets are inflicting a deadly toll in a central China killing 42 people and injuring 1,675 people in three cities in Shaanxi province since July. Government authorities say these attacks are from a particularly venomous species, the world's largest hornet, known as the Asian giant hornet or vespa mandarinia. The giant hornet extends about 3.5 to 3.9 centimeters in length, roughly the size of a human thumb and has an orange head with a black tooth used for burrowing. The Asian giant hornet is intensely predatory; it hunts medium- to large-sized insects, such as bees, other hornet species, and mantises. The pain of the Asian Giant Hornet is described as a hot nail piercing the skin and lasts about 4 hours with instant swelling. One victim told local media earlier this month that "the more you run, the more they want to chase you." Some victims described being chased about 200 meters (656 feet) by a swarm. Local authorities have deployed thousands of police officers and locals to destroy about 710 hives but ""It's very difficult to prevent the attacks because hornet nests are usually in hidden sites," says Shunichi Makino, director general of the Hokkaido Research Center for Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute. Makino, who specializes in entomology, warned that the sting from an Asian giant hornet was severe compared with those of other insects. "The venom of an Asian giant hornet is very special compared with other hornets or yellow jackets," says Makino. "The neurotoxin — especially to mammals including humans — it's a special brand of venom." Asian Giant Hornets have been spotted in the United States."
What's next? Carnivorous rabbits?
I will openly admit, if I was attacked by those giant death machines I would move to another continent. Ain't nobody got time for that!
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
First time I read this headline, I missed that 'hornets' was plural and imagined a single, huge hornet on a murdering rampage across China.
Be afraid...
http://imgur.com/TTrA9KS ... be very afraid.
Badgers eat hornets. We will ship you a box of angry badgers for to expose to giantism causing Fukashima radiation. If I have learned anything from my childhood, its that the solution to giant monsters is more giant monsters.
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
I'll bet the FA18D and E Super Hornets have killed more than that in Iraq and Afghanistan
China is being overrun by killer giant hornets, and the only thing that can stop them is a government created sharknado. The sharknado then starts eating people after they eat all the hornets.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Before you get worried, keep in mind there's little danger here even if you are in China. There have been 1500 injuries, but keep in mind this is a country of 1.3 billion people. That's 0.0011% of the population. 5.1 people per 100,000 in china die from traffic related accidents, which comes to 0.0051%.
You are five times more likely to be killed by a car than you are to get STUNG by one of these things, assuming you are in China.
Don't panic. Unless my numbers are off, which is entirely possible... wait, carry the seven...
4 cm across? I say use birdshot on the swarms. Just watch your backdrop.
To protect against hornets, carry around a vacuum cleaner. Nothing can live inside a vacuum.
Bees. Hornets can keep stinging you until they get bored.
I do admire the Chinese.Just think - being chased by a deadly hornet and still measuring the distance run with such accuracy.
That is bees.... hornets get to sting you over and over and over again.
Night Of the Lepus
Carnivorous rabbits at your service.
Or... you know... we could just kill them as we encounter them. May the better species win.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
30 Giant Hornets v 30,000 Bees
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ1eAM8CChc
Sounds like the same kind of hornets that Matt Inman ran into. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/running5
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
> And you believe your *inset nation* will handle things any differently (minus the guns)?
Yes, I sincerely do. America has a massively irrational fear-button that doesn't ever seem to get desensitised, no matter how often the media and government press it. If the mainstream US media decides to pick this hornet thing up and run with it, you'll see most or all of the following:
- Mass-persecution of harmless bees, wasps, flies and anything else that might be mistaken for a killer hornet of doom. ...
- Idiots panic-buying houseloads of shit for no reason (default american reaction to any major event: Quick! Buy Shit!)
- People barricading themselves in their homes/ cars
- suffocating inside their homes/cars because by "hornet-proofing" a space they made it airtight
- accidentally poisoning themselves with insecticides in improperly-ventilated areas,
- Local governments / school boards/ uni campuses etc passing asinine hornet-related local ordinances
- shooting/ killing one another in hornet-related disputes
- Crashing their cars because they thought the bee in the car with them was a killer hornet.
- shooting at (real or imagined - but almost certainly the latter) killer-hornet nests
- Accidentally setting fire to their homes/ neighbourhoods while trying to burn/ smoke out (real or imagined) killer-hornet nests
- Attempting to shoot at (real or imagined) hornets (leading to accidental shootings of people, pets and livestock)
- deliberately killing themselves out of sheer terror (to be fair, these people tend to be genuinely mentally ill and would have found some other excuse sooner or later)
- shooting at (real or imagined) Chinese people (because obviously this whole hornet thing is their dirty commie terrorist fascist fault)
keyboard cat is going to have a hell of a job keeping up with all this.
>guns... for dealing with thousands of tiny insects....No one is that dumb.
I wasn't really suggesting that they'd buy the ammo to shoot the hornets, just that the mdeia escalates every scare-story up to the level of "imminent apocolypse" and that provokes americans to empty the supermarketrs of canned food and ammo. That said, never underestimate the dumb: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=shoot+at+wasps+with+gun
Beedrill.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
All I can think of is the size of exoskeleton life that used to exist on this planet (some of which when the oxygen levels were higher).
http://listverse.com/2013/01/14/10-prehistoric-bugs-that-could-seriously-mess-you-up/
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Reports indicate the Asian Giant Hornet was briefly spotted in Australia. Upon arriving the colony looked around, said "Fuck me...", and promptly returned to Asia.
Go to youtube and watch "30 hornets vs 30000 bees".
These things don't mess around! By the way, there is a defense...*japanese* honeybees (not the more common *european* honeybees) have a really awesome way of taking down these guys. Basically, a few dozen bees swarm the hornet and flap their little bee-wings like mad. This increases the temperature to around 118 degrees fahrenheit. This is hot enough to kill the hornet, but still a few degrees shy of what will kill the bees. Its awesome to watch, there are a few youtube videos of this as well.
Posting this as anon, because its been so long I forget the details for my 6 digit uin.
We have asian hornets already, last summer they nested in a tree in my garden. The local firebrigade have an obligation to come and and kill the nest if you contact them as they are a invasive species with special requirements.
I called the pompiers, and they came out, but they had no means of reaching the height of the nest that they could get access to (200ft up in my boggy garden), so they went away with talk of poisen delivered by specialist lifting contractors at thousands of euro in costs to me.
That night, the nest mysteriously exploded and fell from its high branch, and I called them back out to deal with the nest on the floor and they came out in suits and applied poisen and took the nest away and some of the hornets and lavae for the local school to do a feature on the species.
Yes they are as big as they say, and they sound like a small drone when flying and it hurt lots when I got stung. And they take some killing, but generally one or two wont do more than annoy you at your bbq. As a species they like to nest as high as possible, so most of the time disturbing the nest means felling a tree or doing similar, its not easy to come in to close contact with the nest.
Probably the biggest indicator is the sudden absence of yellowjackets and bee's in the area. In fact we had a waspinator decoy nest to keep yellojackets down at the bbq area and it seemed to attract the asians looking for a nest to pillage for food.
Where they are a real danger is in a urban environment as they like to live in sewers and other areas that they will come into close contact with humans. Im lucky in that this is very rural so we weren't forced into close quarters with them in this way.
They are plotting a line across france as they advance, killing bee hives and causing destruction in their path, within a year or two they will be in the uk, and its only a matter of time they get everywhere.
So summary, theyre a pain in the ass, but its nto the end of the world and specialists are already equipped to eradicate a nest when discovered, you just dont have to be stupid and pour a can of gas over it or something while theyre awake.
Leela: "What's the mission?"
Farnsworth: "Collecting honey. Ordinary honey."
Leela: "That doesn't sound so dangerous."
Farnsworth: "This is no ordinary honey! It's produced by vicious space bees. A single sting of their hideous neurotoxin can cause instant death!"
Hermes: "And that's if you're not allergic! You don't wanna know what happens then, oh no no, God no."
Farnsworth: "Your insides with boil out of your eye sockets like a science fair volcano!"
Hermes: "I didn't want to know!" *cries*
Here is an interesting biology fact: The chemical that give banana's the majority of their taste, Isoamyl acetate, is the same chemical bees use to alert each other to danger. That is why bees hate bananas and make simple chemistry fun. It also makes bee traps much more effective if put by the entrance.
Ok, we build this giant wooden badger ...
Last summer I had a huge colony of yellow jackets living in my wall. Maybe not as exciting as killer hornets, but still terrifying to me at the time.
The first sign was coming home to find dozens of yellow jackets in my basement, which congregated around the light after I turned it on. I caught most of them with a butterfly net. Next day, same thing. Two days later, they worked their way up to my bedroom, apparently having eaten through the radiator pipe seal. I focused on my bedroom, catching maybe a dozen per day and increasing. They flew out of my printer when I printed a page. Flying insect killer would only kill the ones I hit directly. I started to feel like I was living in the kind of nightmare you see in movies.
I found their entrance hole in the wall outside the house, with hundreds coming in and out. I tried spraying hornet/wasp killer deep into the hole, but no luck. I was warned against sealing the hole, since they would escape into the house, chewing their way through the wall if necessary.
Being a cheapskate, I didn't want to an exterminator to rip open the wall, with repairs to the wall that might have cost thousands, as was suggested. Instead, I ran a shop vac hose next to the opening, sucking up any wasp that tried to enter or leave the hole. After 24 hours, the shop vac was 1/3 full of solid wasp mass, maybe 10000 of them as a guesstimate. I left it running for a week, each day finding fewer. Then I ran it during the day every couple of days, finding less each time.
After a month or so, a batch of new queens and drones came out among the workers, and eventually nothing. There might have been 50K, maybe even 100K total. It was interesting how the queens were very robust and hard to kill compared to the smaller workers.
Close to wintertime, when I was pretty sure they were all gone, I sealed the hole with putty. I read they don't often return to the same nest, and luckily there was no sign of them this year.
Amazingly, I wasn't stung even once throughout all of this, although I was very careful, donning a raincoat, gloves, and a butterfly net over my head in the beginning. On the other hand, my GF was stung a couple of times on her face at her house, causing lots of pain and swelling, just by casually walking next to a bush where they had a nest in the ground.
Yeah... that looks like a tall glass of NOPE!
Their stingers are 1/4" long. They don't need venom.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
When I lived in Japan, I had the misfortune of being stung by one of these damn things.
My upstairs neighbor, a vegan pacifist, noticed the nest but loudly forbid anyone from damaging it.
I was moving in a few weeks, and figured it would be the next person's problem.
The hornets got angry, and as I walked by the nest, one came out and landed on my arm. I remember how it seemed so big it had problems flying.
Sting to my upper right arm. Very painful, and my arm from the lower part of my neck down just past my elbow turned red, got really hot, and stayed that way for a week.
When I told my Japanese neighbor, he very calmly told me "Oh, you we should have taken you to the doctor. These hornets kill many people every year. If it had stung you on the neck, you would have died too. It's ok, too late now, though". Then he got a can of spray that shot 10 Meters, killed the nest, and I got to smash it to bits while my upstairs neighbor whined.