Murder hornets might be making an uninvited comeback in the US.
The New York Post warns that the aggressive insect that originated in Asia could resurface sometime this spring.
According to experts, with warmer weather on the horizon, the queen bees could emerge from underground and start having babies.
“Only the queens survive the winter, and right now, any [hornet] hibernating won’t come out until it’s warm enough to do so, in mid-to-late April,” said Doug Yanega, a scientist at the Entomology Research Museum in California who has studied the hornets.
“At that point, it’s just a queen by herself trying to raise a batch of offspring — and we don’t generally start seeing them until her workers start multiplying in May or June,” he added.
More babies means the “population grows from there.”
The first murder hornet nest was discovered in Washington back in December 2019. There were several sightings last year with the final one in Washington towards the end of October 2020.
The Washington Department of Agriculture shared a video of the containment process as they used a giant vacuum to remove the nest.
Scientists are now planning to set up traps to limit the jumbo stingers to a small northwest corner of the state, per the Post.
“They’re doing everything they can to track them down and wipe them out,” Yanega said of officials.
Asian giant hornets can grow up to 2 inches long and kill about 50 people every year in Japan, according to a report in the New York Times. Jun-ichi Takahashi, a researcher in Japan, told the Times that the “murder hornets” got their nickname because their group has a “searing” sting that can kill people. Multiple stings can leave a victim with an amount of toxic venom comparable to a snake bite.
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They are also known to be a threat to honey bees as they use their sharp mandibles to chop off the heads of bees so they can feed the thoraxes to their young.
On the bright side, scientists don’t believe the hornets will migrate to other parts of the country based on previous geographical data.
“We don’t expect them to be good candidates for spreading quickly,” Yanega said. “There’s no expectation that they’ll move very far or very fast.”
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