Thursday 17 December 2020
With another Asian hornet season now concluded, the Asian Hornet Team have summarised their findings for the year in an annual report.
During the course of the year the Team have responded to 191 reports of suspected sightings of Asian hornets, of which only six were positively confirmed to be the invasive non-native hornet.
The first record of the year was a queen found on 14 April in St Peter Port, followed by others in the Vale, St Sampson's, Castel and a late one that turned up in St Saviours on 3 June.
For the second year running 'Spring Queening' was run from April to June. This is a strategic programme which aims to trap queen hornets either emerging from hibernation or flying in from France. The island-wide trapping was coordinated across the Bailiwick, with 270 traps on Guernsey alone, and all monitored by volunteers.
The 'Track don't Trample' phase of the strategy then took over for the remainder of the year whereby worker hornets are tracked to the location of their large main nest.
No hornets were detected during the summer months and 18 weeks elapsed before the final record of the year was confirmed on 5 October, when a suspected queen appeared at Pembroke, presumed to be newly arrived from France.
This year the Asian Hornet Team also trialled a proactive new approach to tracking worker hornets in the form of sugary bait stations evenly spaced across the island and based on the usual foraging distances that worker hornets will travel from the nest in search of food.
These new bait stations were monitored daily by volunteers but no hornets were reported to have visited them. This, together with the fewer numbers of confirmed sightings to that of previous years, provides good evidence that the Team's (and the public's) efforts to control Asian hornet populations in the Bailiwick are paying off.
Any Asian hornets still remaining in the Bailiwick have now entered hibernation and so the strategy has concluded for another year until the queens emerge once more next spring.
The full report for 2020 can be found at https://gov.gg/asianhornet.
