Slashdot Mirror
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."
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"
Nah, those were exterminated in the 6th century using holy hand grenades.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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...
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.
I'd mark you funny, but only the E, F, & G* versions of the F/A-18 are the Super Hornets. the A-D version are just the Hornet.
*The EF-18G is the Electronic Warfare version of the Super Hornet, but it can carry anti-radiation missiles** so it can kill people.
** Missiles that target radiating sources such as Radars.
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
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.
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.