03 February 2017

Asian Hornets - the damage they do - how to eliminate them

Dominique Urban made us aware of the damage the Asian Hornet is causing in France.  The following is her input:



Eliminating the Asian Hornets (Fr : “frelons asiatiques”)

These hornets, recently arrived in our part of the country from Asia, feed on bees. They stay near
the beehives and catch them on their way in or out of the hives.

The damage to the bee population is enormous, specially as when this damage is added to that caused by weedkillers. Some beekeepers have lost most of their bees.



There is a very simple solution to eliminate many female frelons and thus significantly reduce, year after year, their total numbers :

In Spring, the female frelon looks for sugary food necessary to prepare her eggs (she lays about a thousand!), and still keeps looking for it when it becomes carnivorous.   So we can lay the frelon traps from the end of February to the end of Summer.

You can either buy a wasp trap and hang it from a branch, not too high, and fill it with the kind of
product shown on the photo or, if you like DIY, you can make one from two plastic bottles, one with a large neck at the base of the trap inserted inside the bottom of the other one (used as a tunnel bringing the hornets in).



For the liquid, you can use anything sugary such as water with jam or sugar, or beer…

If there are hornets’ nests near your garden, you’ll capture enormous quantities :  in our fairly small
garden we catch more than 300 with three traps each year !  We never see them in the wild and would never have thought there was a problem !   If you are in a place where the frelons haven’t yet arrived, you’ll catch wasps and big black flies . . . . . so the traps are multi-purpose !

If you like honey and think that bees are necessary for the human race to survive, put up your traps

now !

Asiatic Hornet's Hive


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