Source: Radio New Zealand
MPI officers removing a yellow-legged hornets nest from a property in Glenfield. Supplied / Niki Sherriff
An Auckland North Shore resident who was stung by a yellow-legged hornet while gardening is calling on her community to stay vigilant and report sightings to help eradicate the outbreak.
The number of yellow-legged hornet queens found in Auckland has risen to 49, and 51 nests have been destroyed since the sightings in October last year.
The majority of nests were found in the Glenfield and Birkdale areas, however most recently, new nests had been found in Takapuna and Forest Hill.
Biosecurity New Zealand had laid 1080 traps, and radio tracking technology was introduced in December last year to trace worker hornets back to their nests – already contributing to identifying 10 nests.
Niki Sherriff has had two nests removed from her property on Roberts Road in Glenfield over the past three months.
She was trimming a dense bush in front of her house two weeks ago, when she was stung by a hornet after unwittingly disturbing a hidden nest.
Sherriff said she was stung through her gardening gloves, and was lucky to not be allergic to stings.
In November last year, she reported a hornets’ nest in the corner of her covered deck, and was already familiar with what the insects looked like through leaflets from the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI).
It did not take long for her to recognise the insects flying in and out of the bush, and she immediately reported it to the MPI hornets hotline.
Sherriff said MPI officers exterminated the colony, and have been regularly taking samples from a trap they had put in her lemon tree.
However she was still worried that not everyone in the community was aware of the threat and the need to report sightings, and hoped that eradication and education efforts could be further ramped up.
Sherriff said she felt there may be less awareness of the hornets oubreak among renters and people who did not normally do gardening.
“MPI just can’t do this on their own, they really just need everybody to keep their eyes peeled and be vigilant, they’ve got really good resources on their website about what a hornet looks like,” she said.
Sherriff said she was worried that hornets were in leafy communities like Glenfield, where there were many hedgerows and places for them to build nests.
To date, MPI had received more than 11,060 public reports of sightings.
Biosecurity NZ’s commissioner north, Mike Inglis, said radio transmitters attached to woker hornets had helped to succesfully track 10 yellow-legged hornet nests.
Surveillance and tracking had also scaled up as the summer progressed, he said.
He said the radio trackers had been useful as hornets began to build larger secondary nests high up in the trees, where they were less visible to ground searchers.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
