Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about 'caterpillar touring' in South Africa, an exotic alternative to spending your summer visiting wineries in the South of France.. And today, I give you the '日帰り(higaeri) hornet holiday', an account of yesterday's hornet-hunting endeavours:
The day began while it was still dark. Thanks to a 3.30am wake-up call, we (myself and two hornet-hunters from Kushihara) arrived at our destination in Mie prefecture at 7am. Amidst a beautiful but unfamiliar landscape, we began by seeking out acorn trees and looking for the parts of the tree where sap has soaked the surrounding bark, providing sugar-rich food for giant hornets.
We were looking for foraging worker hornets, who might be tempted to stray from their tree sap and drink some of our honey-water, instead. If/when they obliged, we would mark them with white plastic, follow them back to their nest, and dig it up..(details here) This was the plan for the day.
Our first success came with the discovery of a forest glade filled with Japanese honeybee hives, several of which were accompanied by one of their main predators, the giant hornet Vespa mandarinia:
The day began while it was still dark. Thanks to a 3.30am wake-up call, we (myself and two hornet-hunters from Kushihara) arrived at our destination in Mie prefecture at 7am. Amidst a beautiful but unfamiliar landscape, we began by seeking out acorn trees and looking for the parts of the tree where sap has soaked the surrounding bark, providing sugar-rich food for giant hornets.
We were looking for foraging worker hornets, who might be tempted to stray from their tree sap and drink some of our honey-water, instead. If/when they obliged, we would mark them with white plastic, follow them back to their nest, and dig it up..(details here) This was the plan for the day.
Our first success came with the discovery of a forest glade filled with Japanese honeybee hives, several of which were accompanied by one of their main predators, the giant hornet Vespa mandarinia:
Japanese honeybee hives hidden in the forest
The killing fields..(writhing) giant hornets caught by sticky flypaper on the roof of a Japanese honeybee hive
But this only led us to more honey bees, and to a tiny nest made nearby by a non-giant hornet species:
A field of honeybee hives! The nest shown in the photo below was found at the edge of this field
Tiny hornet nest, the first harvest of the day
While watching the honeybees and hornets, we were also very lucky to be able to see and example of honeybees cooperating to kill their predator, the giant hornet. The bees form a ball of heat around the hornet, a form of defence that has been very well documented here.
Japanese honeybees surrounding a giant hornet and scorching it to death with their collective vibrations
Finally, we found the hornets that would lead us to a nest - feeding on sap from an acorn tree. It took several hours to locate the nest, and in doing so we even resorted to capturing a worker hornet in a plastic bag and driving for ~1km to a place where we thought/hoped we'd find a nest, and letting it go to see where it went. This approach worked surprisingly well, & we found the nest fairly quickly.
And, here's the nest we eventually unearthed:
And, here's the nest we eventually unearthed:
4kg? Our final harvest!
We also managed to retrieve the queen hornet; look closely at the photos below and hopefully it's obvious that her colouring is distinct and unlike the black and yellow stripes of the other castes.
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