Dominique Urban made us aware of the damage the Asian Hornet is causing in France. The following is her input:
Eliminating
the Asian Hornets (Fr : “frelons
asiatiques”)
These
hornets, recently arrived in our part of the country from Asia, feed on bees.
They stay near
the
beehives and catch them on their way in or out of the hives.
The
damage to the bee population is enormous, specially as when this damage is
added to that caused by weedkillers. Some beekeepers have lost most of their
bees.
There is
a very simple solution to eliminate many female frelons and thus significantly reduce, year after year, their total
numbers :
In
Spring, the female frelon looks for
sugary food necessary to prepare her eggs (she lays about a thousand!), and
still keeps looking for it when it becomes carnivorous. So we can lay the frelon traps from the end
of February to the end of Summer.
You can
either buy a wasp trap and hang it from a branch, not too high, and fill it
with the kind of
product
shown on the photo or, if you like DIY, you can make one from two plastic
bottles, one with a large neck at the base of the trap inserted inside the
bottom of the other one (used as a tunnel bringing the hornets in).
For the
liquid, you can use anything sugary such as water with jam or sugar, or beer…
If there
are hornets’ nests near your garden, you’ll capture enormous quantities : in our fairly small
garden we
catch more than 300 with three traps each year ! We never see them in the wild and would never
have thought there was a problem ! If
you are in a place where the frelons
haven’t yet arrived, you’ll catch wasps and big black flies . . . . . so the
traps are multi-purpose !
If you
like honey and think that bees are necessary for the human race to survive, put
up your traps
now !
Asiatic Hornet's Hive
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