Researchers Could Lure Murder Hornets to Their Deaths With Sex
The smell of hornet sex may be entomologists' best bet for culling these giant invaders.
"Birds do it, bees do it—even the wasps that kill bees do it. A clever team of scientists now has an idea to use the Asian giant hornets’ horniness against them, in hopes of stopping the invasive species from decimating U.S. bee populations. They’ve identified the sex pheromones of the queen and propose trapping the hornet drones that are lured in by the pheromones.
The (Vespa mandarinia) preys on bees, and its stings are pretty painful to humans (they can people who are allergic to their venom). The hornets are native to Asia but have recently spread into the U.S.; they were in Washington State in August 2020, and they’ve spread across the American northwest. This invasion is worrying, since the hornets can slaughter a honeybee hive in a matter of hours.
Recently, a team of entomologists caught a bunch of virgin giant hornet queens and their drones from colonies in Yunnan, China. They swabbed the queens’ sex glands and used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to identify pheromone compounds from six of the queens. The team’s findings were in Current Biology.
“We were able to isolate the major components of the female sex pheromone, a odor blend that is highly attractive to males who compete to mate with virgin queens,” said James Nieh, an entomologist at the University of California at San Diego and co-author of the recent paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “When these components or their blend was tested in sticky traps, they captured thousands of males.”
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