Class: Insects
Other names and species: Asian giant hornet, Japanese giant hornet
Size: 27 to 55mm
Weight: Variable
Appearance: Orange head, golden brown body
Food: Insects, pollen
Distribution: East and Southeast Asia
Original location: East and Southeast Asia
Habitat: Gardens, forests, nests in bushes
Natural enemies: Honey buzzard, Chinese mantis, fan wing
Social behavior: State-building insect
Threatened with extinction: No

• The Asian hornet can grow up to 55mm in size. This makes it the largest hornet in the world, five times larger than a normal bee. The Asian hornet is native to East Asia and Southeast Asia.
• Due to their body size, hornets have a correspondingly higher venom blister content than bees, but the venom is less effective. In the end, the stings of wasps, hornets, bees and bumblebees are about equally effective and painful.
• Vespa mandarinia likes to build its nests in underground burrows. If above-ground nesting sites (tree holes etc.) are occasionally used, these are rarely above 1 to 2m above the ground.
• After about a week, larvae are formed from the eggs of the queen hornet. The larvae scratch the cell wall with their mouthparts and signal the queen to look for food. She brings suitable prey, mainly insects, which are decapitated by the sharp upper jaw pincers and chewed into a soft food mass. The queen also eats some to meet the protein requirements for reproduction. Later hatching workers similarly provide for the succeeding brood. The larvae grow rapidly on chewed prey and enter the pupal stage. Every autumn, males, the drones, also hatch. They die shortly after mating with the young queen.
• The hatched female hornet worker does not grow any more and does not need any proteins herself, but due to her huge body and her energetic flight activities, she has a high demand for sugar, which, apart from digestive material from the prey, can initially be met by visiting flowers. Like all wasp workers, adult hornets feed almost exclusively vegetarian, mainly on sugar and pollen.
• At the beginning of the colder season, the hornet colony dies – only young queens can survive in a protected environment with a suitable microclimate. In the spring of the second year, they fly out to find a new nest.
• Asian hornets often carry out large-scale coordinated attacks on smaller wasp and honey bee nests. First, an individual giant hornet scout make search flights and mark a suitable nest with scent, the pheromone. Other workers follow the scent and attack the marked nest. Hornets use their well-developed mouthparts and are largely protected from the defensive stings of wasps and bees by their strong chitin armour. The loss in attacked bee colonies is very high in each case (on average 40 animals per minute) and can even lead to the extinction of the entire colony. Overpowered nests are often looted and destroyed. This makes the Asian hornet very unpopular with local beekeepers. The high aggressiveness of the Asian hornet towards bees makes it a major pest for them.