Desearch work carried out jointly in China and France has identified the sex pheromone of the Asian hornet, raising hopes for the forthcoming development of a trap against this insect which eats bees and can prove fatal to humans. man. As part of a Franco-Chinese partnership, “scientists have identified the sex pheromone of the Asian hornet and tested it as bait in China and France. They thus showed that the pheromone bait could attract many males during the species’ reproduction period (from September to November) and thus keep them away from the future queens at the origin of new colonies, “explains a press release from the University of Tours.
As Courrier international points out, the giant hornet from Asia is wreaking havoc in North America, where it is beginning to develop. “These results give hope for the forthcoming development of a trap to fight against this invasive hornet, says the press release, using this sex pheromone as a selective bait. As this one is species-specific, it only attracts males of the Asian hornet. The idea is to capture these males in large numbers before they can mate with future hornet queens.”
A still limited method
The queens “cannot mate with males, or not enough, it is possible to imagine in the long term a reduction in the number of colonies of Asian hornets on the ground or less populous colonies (….) And if they mate with their brothers, the phenomenon of consanguinity that the French researchers had highlighted increases, also giving rise to a reduction in the number of individuals,” note the scientists. This work, the results of which have just been published in the journal Entomologia Generalis, was carried out as part of a partnership between the Institute for Research on Insect Biology (CNRS/University of Tours) and the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (Kunming, Chinese Academy of Sciences).
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Allen Gibbs, a researcher in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, however, tempers the effectiveness of this system in certain cases. Quoted by Courrier international, he explains that “this method attracts the males, but if they have already mated, the females are free to fly away and found a new colony. These traps would therefore only be useful for a few months, during the mating period.
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