Beyond the “Murder Hornet” Panic

Murder hornets media is back.

“If you thought 2020 couldn’t get any worse, Asian giant hornets have appeared in the United States for the first time,” clamored TIME on May 2, 2020.

Four weeks later a Gizmodo writer admitted she was “still terrified” of “these big murder boys.”

Forged hornet warning posters—posing as state bulletins—have terrorized Seattle-area hikers. People on the West Coast of the United States are mistaking native bees for “these big murder boys” and killing them in great enough numbers that news outlets are running stories asking them to stop.

Alien. Murder. Panic.

“Each one of the hornets can kill a bee every 14 seconds,” New York Times reporter Mike Baker explains on the paper’s The Daily podcast. “They’re really after . . . the part of the bee known as the thorax, essentially the bee’s chest,” which the hornets gather and feed to larval offspring.

Lo, foreign hornets litter head-strewn honey to cull thousands of thoraxes in “massacre after massacre after massacre.”

While factual, these grim portraits carry loaded narratives.

This weekend @waDNR and our agency received several reports of a suspicious sign posted at trailheads. Your instincts were correct! This sign is FAKE and most of the information on the sign was incorrect. Real #AsianGiantHornet info is always at https://t.co/o8g9ZHvSAd pic.twitter.com/CChSdynvaE

— WA St Dept of Agr (@WSDAgov) May 26, 2020

On The Daily, Baker considers what he calls “the uncanny parallels” between COVID-19 and the murder hornets: both “come in from Asia,” were initially noticed in the Pacific Northwest, and appeared “poised to spread.” Although “our lives are consumed by coronavirus that we didn’t prevent . . . from spreading,” he muses, “we’re almost back at the beginning of that [hornet] story and a chance to get it right.”

But what does “getting it right” mean? How might better hornet stories shed xenophobic invasion tropes, complicate interspecies relationships, and reject the plantation ecologies of commercial beekeeping in the United States? How might we learn to live with Asian giant hornets?

Bees as Kin and Commodities

Relationships between humans and honey bees feed the urgency behind “murder hornet” media. Many reporters have spoken with Ted McFall, a Washington State beekeeper whose beehives fell early to the Asian giant hornets. McFall loves bees. “Whenever they’re cranky,” he explains on The Daily, “sometimes I talk to them, and they’re trying to sting me and … I talk to them. I say, hey, what’s going on? Why are you so upset? … is a predator messing with you guys?” McFall cares for the bees as kin.

That kinship informs McFall’s loss. He describes the “carnage inside the beehive,” destroyed in November 2019. “There were just bees chopped up left and right. There were bee heads everywhere … I had been a beekeeper for so many years. I had never seen anything like this.” His voice crackles with frustration.

Whether with bees, sheep, or dogs, environmental historians often analyze how human make emotional bonds with animals. And these relationships are essential when learning to mend exploited nature. In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway argues that “We need to make kin . . . who and whatever we are, we need to make-with—become-with, compose-with—the earth-bound.” Loving broadly resews broken earth.

But can care extend to murder hornets, to Vespa mandarinia, too? While McFall’s emotional testimony invites listeners to participate in his pain and encourages sympathy with his solution—repulsing the hornet invasion—it does not help to explain how we have arrived at this juncture. For that, it is necessary to see familiar honeybees as both partners and colonizing newcomers.

In her recent book The Heartland, historian Kristen L. Hoganson offers a brief, illuminating bee history of the nineteenth-century Midwest. There, Hoganson argues that an agricultural obsession with “perfecting” pollinators forged American farmers’ reliance on Eurasian honeybees:

Then there were the Italians that swarmed across the Illinois countryside—countless millions of them, descended from imported queens. Queen bees, that is. Whereas Italian people struck nativists as undesirable in the late nineteenth century, Italian bees had a warmer reception. Beekeepers found the offspring of these pollinators to be superior honey gatherers, quieter and more peaceable than native breeds, more prolific … Enthusiasts also preferred the Italians’ golden bands to the dull black color of native bees.

Farmers imported Eurasian honeybees (Apis mellifera) to colonize ecological niches occupied by indigenous bees and to support burgeoning industrial farming. Honeybees were novel terra-formers hired to Europeanize the continent. They are now ubiquitous and assiduously guarded against specters of risk. Fears of “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), for example, have proliferated since the mid-2000s and prompted numerous calls to “save” the bees. Yet in the past few years, multiple studies all demonstrate that honeybee populations are actually increasing rather than withering, often at the expense of native bee species. Continued attention to CCD—and responses to Vespa mandarinia—may reflect efforts to police the boundaries of settler ecologies as much as they reflect concern for Apis mellifera’s existential fate.

Plantation Ecologies and Loss

Interspecies alliances sour when exclusive. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has described how plantations—“simplified ecologies designed to create assets for future investments” by exploiting human and non-human labor alike—endanger our world. Analyzing profit-driven, global ash supply chains, Tsing asks readers to ponder how “fungal pathogens” would encounter industrial ash tree plantations: “imagine the feast for ‘hunter’ fungi: an endless meal of helpless and identical prey.” Plantations create susceptibility; predatory fungi merely perform in a niche.

And these ecologically simplified plantations are everywhere. Midwestern cornfields, Vietnamese rubber forests, African phosphate mines: each produces homogenous commodities—corn, rubber, phosphorus—while suppressing all other growth. In Apis mellifera’s case, this means “artificial hives throughout the United States” that are sustained by “a large and sophisticated beekeeping industry” busy “mass-producing queens and bees for sale to other beekeepers.” And by ensuring that bees, like Tsing’s ash trees, “coordinate only with replicas—and with the time of the market,” vulnerable abundance and abundant vulnerability ensue.

Mourning Apis mellifera and scrutinizing the predatory insects’ shipping routes will neither pin meaningful fault nor balm loss. The original sin was making plantation assets of honeybees. Vespa mandarinia merely exposed the pact with Apis mellifera.

That is not to say the pact was unfruitful. Honeybees heal mined landscapes, teach us ecological empathy, and reveal our embeddedness in ecosystems. On The Daily, McFall rattled off all the things now owed to honeybees—from apples and nuts to avocados and, through grains, meats. “Bees do so much for us that people don’t really realize it, but if the bees find themselves in trouble, then humanity will find itself in trouble.” He’s right.

Nevertheless, beekeepers stand astride histories of colonization, exchange, and winnowing to insist “stop, here’s fine,” rather than reconsidering the investment and policy preferences that created precarious plantations in the first place.

Make Stories, Make Kin, Make Life

Entomologists at the Washington State Department of Agriculture will campaign against the hornets—and may succeed. Experts may exterminate the hornets. They may cross-breed Apis mellifera with Japanese honeybees (Apis cerana japonica), which evolved to fight Vespa mandarinia. Experts may decide that McFall and his colleagues should invest in Apis cerana japonica entirely. Who knows: invasive species histories are littered with such decisions and unintended consequences.

Ultimately, “getting it right” may mean more than simply winning the Great Hornet Hunt.

In part, “getting it right” means avoiding old stories, ensuring that the current escalation of anti-Asian racism amid COVID-19, and the racialization of invasive species debates do not poison Asian giant hornet debates.

But we also need new stories to get murder hornets “right.” We must come to see the honeybee plantation that made the Pacific Northwest an ideal ecological niche for Vespa mandarinia—or ōsuzumebachi in Japanese.

“Getting it right” means integrating the culturally specific legacy of ōsuzumebachi—its Japanese reputation as the “giant sparrow hornet,” its status as a culinary delicacy, and its annual role in the Kushihara Hebo Matsuri festival—as part of its North American arrival. It means realizing ōsuzumebachi has always belonged somewhere and that it might belong here now. “Getting it right” means recognizing that ōsuzumebachi is not an alien genocidal invader but a co-product of the world that humans wrought from nature.

We humans and the teardrop-faced insect terrors are both “earth-bound.” Making kin is challenging but life without kin is death. Make new kin, make new life.

Featured image: Asian giant hornet. Photo courtesy of the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

Samuel Klee is a Ph.D. candidate in American Environmental History at Saint Louis University and is joining Universitetet i Oslo as a Doctoral Research Fellow this fall. His dissertation explores farms that functioned like prisons in the United States during World War II. Twitter. Contact.