Asian Hornets – Some Advice From Jersey

Alastair is also a beekeeper of 23 years standing. 2025 was a wake-up call for all Jersey beekeepers as most hives were predated at some stage during the summer and reports suggest that some 24 hives were lost.  

Jersey has eight years experience dealing with Asian hornets as it is only 14 miles from France with prevailing easterly winds in the spring.  

He observed that Jersey beekeepers seem to prefer to update protection around their hives rather than spending time tracking nests.  

Each hornet nest has a queen, drones and workers. Early workers are only 20mm long as the queen has fed them herself early in the season. The size increases at the end of the year to 30mm long. Hibernating queens emerge in January/February and Jersey monitors are on the lookout once they have three days close to 13 degrees – a situation unlikely to occur on the Isle of Man! It is at this time that the queen will travel to find a suitable place for her first nest. It is thought that the hornet infestation will advance 80 to 100 km each year. In March/April embryo nests appear usually low down often in sheds and roots spaces. With the queen doing all the work herself, egg to adult takes around 45 days but this reduces to 30 later in the year when the colony is fully active. As numbers increase beyond around 250 individuals the colony will move to a secondary nest where numbers will build up to around two and a half thousand. With more mouths to feed, June and July sees the hunt for protein to feed the larvae. It is not thought that hornets waggle dance to communicate the location of prey and individuals seem to stumble across food sources by accident. Analysis of larvae shows that all pollinators are taken but honey bees were by far the most common species. 

Secondary nests are high up in trees and maybe 30 meters above the ground often on the east side of the canopy top so a long lance is needed to inject pesticide. The trunks of suspect trees can be bashed with a lump hammer to alarm the hornets and the agitated inhabitants can be detected through binoculars. In September/October drones and queens emerge and the queens get mated and some 15 to 20 will leave each day and find somewhere to hibernate. The old nest dies out with the old queen and the nest material rots away during the winter. There is a poor survival rate of the hibernating queens and if 200-500 were released, only five percent may be able to survive. 

Beehives will be attacked from July to October and the loss of bees and a reluctance to go out foraging will reduce the colony vigour and it may fail during the winter. Some beekeepers have taken to early feeding to increase the stores. It is not unknown for hornets to strip a hive completely.  

Beekeepers should not draw attention to their apiaries. All wax should be collected; hives only inspected at dusk and fitted with a solid floor or else an insert sheet and if the hive is on a stand plastic or hessian should be wrapped around the legs around to create a skirt so that hornets cannot lurk underneath.  

Muzzles can be attached to the front of the hive. These are often homemade using chicken wire which a bee can fly through but a hornet cannot. Other barriers like palm fronds stuck a bucket of soil in front of the entrance seem to do the same thing. Electric fences are used but they are expensive and a five colony apiary will probably need three of them, two in front and one behind. 

Hornet nest destroyers use BB Wear Ultra beesuits with an undertunic of the same material for further protection. Gauntlets are fully arms length. Hornets are known to evacuate poo when they attack so that goggles are needed under the veil. 

Hornets can sting multiple times. In 2025 there were 42 sting incidents reported which resulted in at least 12 hospitalisations; one poor chap was stung eight times.  

On Jersey in 2025 spring queen trapping yielded 1376 insects against 476 in 2023 and only three in 2018. 492 nests were dealt with, another big increase. 60 volunteers are available for trapping. Inevitably nests will be missed and budgets have been cut so 2026 will see another increase in hornet activity. In France there are an estimated 20 nests per square kilometer in some areas.  

People will be stung and bothered in pub gardens as hornets like beer and wine. All pollinators will be predated. Luckily there is little soft fruit farming on Jersey but in Spain some grape picking has to take place at night surrounded by hornet traps. Any source of protein needs to be protected from incursion, carelessly managed waste fish skips by the harbour are a particular source.  

Guernsey does not have the same problems as it is further from France but the government there has divided the whole Island into 500 meter squares and has a trap near the middle of all of them for monitoring purposes.  

There is concern that traps are not particularly selective and 8.5mm washers have been glued to the holes of the Veto Pharma units that we have deployed at Manx ports. During the season daily inspection is essential if hornets are about. The Vespacatch chemical supplied by Thornes was not thought to be particularly effective and Trappit lure should be used on a sponge wick rather than having a liquid medium. 

Tracking is a laborious affair which demands marking a hornet, seeing the direction it sets off again and timing its return. As a rule of thumb each minute away says the nest is one hundred meters away. The insect is trapped and move closer to its nest until a rapid return occurs. Hornets can be trapped and marked in the same way as queen bees and bits of tinsel can be super glued to their thoraxes which makes it much easier to see through binoculars. Radio transmitters can also be attached but monitoring equipment appears to be quite cumbersome. Trapping and releasing invasive species into the wild will technically be illegal so some derogation will be necessary. People setting traps and dealing with nests are insured under the government scheme. 

Once the nest is located a team is called in for destruction which involves a long telescopic lance which is able to introduce 0.5% permethrin pesticide into the nest. Flamethrowers and shot guns are not advised.

What should the Isle of Man do?

It is important that everyone collaborates and that little empires do not get built up.  

Awareness amongst the public must be built up as the threat becomes more urgent.  

We must continue to monitor traps and prepare for the worst. Eradication will require more volunteers to put out a lot more traps. On the plus side the island is quite isolated, the climate is a lot cooler than Jersey which means we could be close to the northern limit for hornets to survive so migration from nearby Scotland is less likely.  

Will need to address the legality of trapping and release as well as insurance for an increasing band of trappers and destroyers.  

It is my view that the island is well placed with DEFA being ready, the general population can easily be mobilised as they are already aware of the importance of pollinators so it should be easy to expand trapping beyond the beekeeping community. The danger will be complacency.