No need to worry about ‘murder hornets’ in Sask.: U of S assistant prof

An assistant professor of plant sciences at the University of Saskatchewan says living in this province, residents shouldn’t have to worry about the giant Asian hornets everyone seems to be panicking about.

The large insects have earned the nickname ‘murder hornets’ for the way they wipe out entire honey bee colonies, decapitating the bees and using them as food for their young.

Murder hornets were spotted in British Columbia and Washington state last year and because of that, some people started to panic.

Sean Prager with the U of S says as far as he knows, those are the only ones that have been found in North America.

“So that alone means they’re not very common,” he said. “And they’re invasive, so if they are here, they got here because someone accidentally introduced them one way or another.”

Prager says the hornets prefer forested areas, which Saskatchewan does not have a lot of, and our winters are likely too cold for them to handle.

These large hornets are mostly found in India, Thailand, parts of China, Japan, and Korea.

The hornets do sting, but like bees and other wasps, the odds of a person getting stung if they aren’t antagonizing the hornets are pretty low.

“According to the U.S. government, they estimate that between 40 to 60 people a year die from allergic reactions to honey bee stings, so it’s not as if being stung isn’t a problem for people in general, and the numbers that seem to get thrown around for these (murder) hornets really aren’t much different than what you’d expect from honey bees,” Prager said.

The giant hornets are more of a threat to beekeepers and their honey bee colonies.

“But even that would only be an issue if you got them here and they established themselves and started going after honey bees,” Prager said.

These hornets can be up to five centimetres in length, with a wingspan of up to seven centimetres.

“I think they are technically the biggest of all the hornet species, which puts them among the biggest of all wasps,” said Prager, who noted the hornets can be the size of an adult thumb.