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Native bees, for instance, pollinate 75% of fruits, nuts and vegetables grown in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports.
Yet even government beekeepers have announced plans to set traps that will kill some of these extremely essential insects, Doug Yanega, senior museum scientist for the Department of Entomology at UC Riverside, told the Los Angeles Times.
SEE: Traps will be set out soon, KY officials say
SEE: Tennessee to set ‘murder hornet’ traps later this month
“My colleagues in Japan, China and Korea are just rolling their eyes in disbelief at what kind of snowflakes we are,” Yanega said.
At a time when stories about other subjects are constantly labeled “fake news,” people seem more inclined to believe horror movie-style tales over educated entomologists.
Unfortunately, experts say, those choosing fear over facts have begun pursuing a “cure” that’s much worse than the supposed “problem.”
"The indiscriminate killing of bees, wasps or other hornet lookalikes would be detrimental because of beneficial roles these insects provide as plant pollinators and predators of agricultural pests," said Professor Dina M. Fonseca, director of the Center for Vector Biology in the Department of Entomology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers-New Brunswick.
Thanks to a public used to drawing conclusions from headlines, the freak-out factor continues to spread in the face of evidence to the contrary.
“They are not ‘murder hornets.’ They are just hornets,” Washington Agriculture Department entomologist Chris Looney told ahahi.com.
“People are afraid of the wrong thing,” University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum added. “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.”
It all began with a New York Times story earlier this month about a beekeeper in Washington State who had a hive destroyed by the hornets last winter.
Then came a report of two Asian giant hornets found just a few miles north of there.
Since then: None.
Given that Asian giant hornets are native to Southeast Asia, finding them at the western point of the Washington-British Columbia border wasn’t all that alarming, Yanega said.
There was another report out of British Columbia, he noted, but a single dead hornet found there apparently wasn’t related to the others, he said.
“The only people who should be bothering experts with concerns about wasp IDs are living in the northwest quadrant of Washington (State),” Yanega told the L.A. Times. “And really, right now, nobody else in the country should even be thinking about this stuff.”
The Asian giant hornet (vespa mandarinia) "has not yet been detected this spring," Fonseca of Rutgers said, "and we do not expect them on the East Coast."
SEE: ‘Murder' Hornets Aren’t Coming, Experts Say
Should the hornets should somehow make it out off the Great Northwest, she said, we'd have plenty of warning.
“It is most likely that the Asian giant hornet would first spread and be reported in surrounding areas bordering Washington State and British Columbia before any reports would occur on the East Coast,” Fonseca noted. “Knowing this information may help to calm fears when seeing other hornets and wasps.”
Those preparing for a 2020 invasion may be too young to remember the “killer bees” – Africanized honeybees that made it from South America as far north as the Southwest before petering out in the 1970s.
The phenomenon even led to a series of skits on "Saturday Night Live" (see video below).
So where did the name for “murder hornets” come from?
According to Yanega, a Japanese TV network began using the name on a program around 2004.
“It took all that time for that name to be translated into English for our newspapers,” he told the L.A. Times, “and it’s really unfortunate.”
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