Threat || They are due in Lisbon by 2017, and the Algarve two years later.
Vespa velutina – more commonly dubbed Asian Killer Hornets – arrived in Europe mistakenly packed in boxes of pottery over a decade ago.
They are thought to have already caused the deaths of six people in France (as reported in the Daily Mirror earlier this year), as well as dozens in China. Now the threat is on the advance in Portugal.
According to Alfredo Marques, president of the Cávado and Ave beekeepers’ association, in the north of Portugal, “the hornet is already in Coimbra” and menacing local insect populations.
Talking at a meeting in Guimarães, he said the insect poses a major threat to the nation’s bees (European honeybee, Apis mellifera), and can spread up to 100 km a year.
“We predict it will have reached the Alentejo coast within three years,” he said, adding that by 2019 it will have arrived in the Algarve.
The only hope is that the Alentejo’s exceptionally hot summers might slow-up the hornets’ spread, as breeding females “cannot take too much heat”.
At their peak of production, Asian killer hornets are known to consume as many as 5,000 bees. They also prey on dragonflies, grasshoppers, crickets and other insects.
The risk they pose to humans is not meant to be huge. As Denis Thiery, an Asian killer hornet specialist who works for the French National Institute for Agriculture Research, told newspaper Le Parisien: “Never attempt to destroy an Asian hornet nest yourself but call on specialist organisations, as this species charges in a group as soon as it feels its nest is threatened.”
Reporting on ‘alien species’ invading Britain earlier this year, the Daily Mirror wrote that the hornets “devastated villages across France” as they progressed in the direction of UK, causing the deaths of at least six people through anaphylactic shock.
“It is enough simply to touch a nest,” Jornal de Notícias reports. “In this situation, hornets can pursue someone over a distance of more than 50 metres. The attack is mounted by tens of insects in unison, and characterised by successive stings.”
In Portugal, Alfredo Marques said firefighters are helping combat the invasion by destroying nests as they are being identified, but still a “unified effort” is needed if bee populations are to be secured.
Despite all the efforts so far, he told the meeting, tens of thousands of bees in the Ave and Cávado regions have been wiped out.
