A 54-year-old Spanish citizen died this Sunday after being stung by a velutin wasp or, as it is better known, a murderous hornet.
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The events reported this Sunday by the newspaper The voice of Galicia, occurred near Santiago de Compostela, in the northwest of Spain.
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The newspaper identified the victim as a beekeeper who was working in an apiary on his property.
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According to the newspaper, the man and a neighbor discovered the nest of the velutin wasps and one of them stung it on the eyebrow. The man vanished shortly afterwards at his home, located not far from where the sting occurred. Although the emergency services came, they could not save his life.
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For its part, the newspaper The Galician Mail disclosed that the deceased man was not allergic to wasp venom.
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Eradication plans
The AP news agency He noted that the velutin wasp is a 5-centimeter (2-inch) giant Asian insect nicknamed ‘the killer hornet,’ which is also a bee eater.
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The hornet was first seen in the United States last December, when the Washington State Department of Agriculture verified two reports around the town of Blaine, near the Canadian border. It also received two probable, but unconfirmed reports from other sites in the same state.
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“They look like they came out of cartoons, with that huge yellow-orange face,” said Susan Cobey, a beekeeper at Washington State University.
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“It is an impressively large hornet,” said Todd Murray, an entomologist with the same university’s Extension program and a specialist in invasive species. “It is a threat to health and even more importantly, it is a significant predator of bees.”
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The hornet can sting through most beekeeper suits, inject nearly seven times more venom than a bee, and do it multiple times, said the Department of Agriculture, which said it has ordered special reinforced suits from China.
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Mexico in a state of “epidemiological surveillance”
Meanwhile, the Mexican government announced on Saturday the implementation of an epidemiological surveillance system to prevent the entry into that country of the Asian giant hornet (velutin wasp), after specimens of this invasive species were detected in the United States.
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“Even when this plague is located on the northern border of the United States, more than 2,500 kilometers from the national territory, it is important to begin your search so that in case your entry to Mexico is registered, you will be in a position to react in a timely manner” , the Ministry of Agriculture of Mexico informed the EFE agency in a statement.
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According to the Mexican authorities, the entry of this species, whose venom is more toxic than that of the American species, would affect the 43,500 beekeepers in Mexico, which have an inventory of more than two million hives for honey production and crop pollination.
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In the event that they detect a colony of this species, the agency invited producers and society in general to immediately inform technical personnel and not to attempt to remove it, drive it away, or apply any insecticide.
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The entity stressed that while Asian giant hornets do not bother people, they can sting if they feel threatened.
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Although the giant Asian hornet has NOT been detected in Mexico, the solution is NOT to exterminate wasps or bees, since many of them play a very important role in ecosystems.
The photos of this tw are of species native to Mexico and North America.https://t.co/8AsHtaZSlg pic.twitter.com/hoEgN0WxQG– CONABIO (@Conabio) May 9, 2020
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