Source: Radio New Zealand
MPI officers removing a yellow-legged hornets nest from a property in Glenfield. Supplied / Niki Sherriff
A massive eradication effort to get rid of what could have been a disastrous insect invasion is showing encouraging signs
Six months ago, fear flew through the bee industry with the discovery of a yellow-legged hornet on Auckland’s North Shore.
At risk – a $59 billion primary industry and very possibly, human lives – this tiny insect can pack a mighty sting.
The number of queens discovered went up and up; the maps depicting the areas of interest kept growing; and it looked like we may have lost the battle against the Vespa Velutina.
Now, after a $12 million eradication programme, 50 sets of tracking boots on the ground, great swathes of the population putting traps in their trees, 16,625 reports to the Ministry for Primary Industries, radio transmitters hooked onto worker wasps and the deployment of AI cameras:
“There’s hope.”
That’s according to Phil Lester, professor of entomology and ecology at Victoria University.
“There’s optimism,” he says. “There’s cautious hope and optimism out there at least.”
The eradication team has begun to find what it’s looking for – and that’s nothing. No more queens.
The number discovered stands at 77, associated with about 63 nests, and in spite of massive ongoing searches it has remained the same for some weeks now.
Lester says the numbers were scary.
“It was actually beyond my expectations of how many they’d be finding. And if you think about that, each individual nest would produce 70 to 80 new queens, then if we’d let those get away and those 70 had produced 70 or 80 more, that’s multiplication that’s very scary.”
The Ministry for Primary Industries has been leading the charge against the hornet, with the help of $12 million in government funding.
But hordes of North Shore residents who’ve been happy to let MPI biosecurity staff onto their sections to look for nests have also been behind the effort.
“MPI have indicated that the people are really engaged, and that’s awesome,” he says.
The hornets are believed to have got no further than six kilometres from the original ground zero, with one being found in Takapuna.
Lester says fear is a big part of the success in getting the message through.
“These hornets, in parts of Europe, have been devastating to the honey bee industry … there was quite a bit of concern from a lot of people, from beekeepers especially and Apiculture New Zealand, for example, who really got the message out there and put the pressure on MPI and the minister to act.”
The eradication money funded two experts from the UK to come and train MPI workers, and they also brought radio tracking technology, AI cameras to spot the yellow-legged hornet coming and going, advice and insights. Lester says that will be valuable in fighting future threats.
However he warns this isn’t the time to stop being vigilant.
“We’re not a hundred percent sure that all the nests have been discovered and there’s that possibility that that one nest might be hidden somewhere out there that’s just not really apparent … and if we miss that, we could be back to square one next year, trying to get another 70 or 80 queens.
But, “there’s hope. We’re not seeing workers, we’re not seeing queens, so I’m hopeful that we’ve got them.”
Experts think that around this time of year the hornets are starting to reproduce new queens.
“Everything up to now has been the production of mostly workers. So they’re producing workers so that they can have a really big nest and defend it really well, and then there’s a switch in autumn towards the production of new queens, gynes we call them, that would then mate over winter and prepare for next year.”
All the hornets found can be traced genetically back to the same source, so it looks like they came from just one nest. Lester says it may never be known how it came into the country, or exactly where the infestation started, because no nest has been found that looked like it was around from the 2024/25 summer.
Lester says the techniques learned in this eradication effort and the training of biosecurity staff will be valuable when the next infestation of something unwanted hits us.
“What we’ve got now is some skills and expertise in being able to eradicate or control. We know how to find these things much better than we did this time last year … MPI will be developing a standard operating procedure for finding hornets and destroying their nests … so we are ahead.
“And I think the public have got behind it to an extent because they’re wasps and stingy things, and nobody really likes stingy things that hurt them all that much.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
