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An Asian giant hornet killed a 54-year-old beekeeper in Spain after he was stung on the eyebrow while tending to hives near his home, according to multiple reports. The incident occurred in the northwest region of Santiago, Galicia.
The hornets recently arrived in the United States (in Washington State) and Canada (in the Vancouver area), leading to national concerns.
The giant hornet, Vespa mandarinia, has been known to kill dozens of people each year and could potentially devastate the country’s bee populations, which has already been on the decline.
The massive two-inch hornets have been known to massacre honey bees in their hives, decapitating their victims and feeding their bodies to their young, but the hornets are deadly to humans as well, killing up to 50 people a year in their native Japan alone.
A single hornet can kill up to 30 bees per day, which has sent beekeepers around the globe scrambling to keep them under control, though the panic some feel in the United States over the hornets is overblown, according to some health officials.
“Millions and millions of innocent native insects are going to die as a result of this,” Dr. Doug Yanega, a professor of entomology at the University of California, told the Los Angeles Times. “Folks in China, Korea, and Japan have lived side by side with these hornets for hundreds of years, and it has not caused the collapse of human society there. My colleagues in Japan, China, and Korea are just rolling their eyes in disbelief at what kind of snowflakes we are.”
University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum also noted: “People are afraid of the wrong thing. The scariest insect out there are mosquitoes. People don’t think twice about them. If anyone’s a murder insect, it would be a mosquito.”
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