A BEEKEEPER says he fears for the future of Jersey’s insects after two honey-bee hives were wiped out by Asian hornets.
Bob Tompkins, an environmentalist who writes the JEP’s nature pages, posted a video on social media of what he discovered when he checked on his hives after several weeks out with an injury.
‘There were more hornets in the hive than bees,’ he said. ‘In the process of clearing one hive, we cleared out 250 hornets which had just wiped out the colony. Then we checked another further along and they’d taken that out too.’
There was a ‘full tracking team’ in the area yesterday, and Mr Tompkins said there were several large nests in the location, with one causing ‘particular problems’.
He continued: ‘I’m afraid this is a sign of what’s going to happen in the future.’
Asian hornets are known to prey on bees and other insects – and have destroyed thousands of hives while spreading north through Europe.
While Mr Tompkins saw a similar attack the previous year, he said this one was ‘far, far worse’.
The number of Asian hornet nests discovered in Jersey this summer has broken the previous record, with months of tracking work still due to be carried out for the 2023 season.
Over 180 nests have been located, compared to 174 found during the whole of 2022.
Mr Tompkins said: ‘These attacks are going to certainly affect our honey-bee population, and therefore our honey production and honey industry, even if we’re not huge producers. Local honey will definitely be in short supply, and that’s partly due to the weather so far this year, where we had drought in June and then rain consistently throughout July.’
He continued: ‘That’s not the biggest problem though. I fear for the amount of damage these insects do to others. Anything that has wings, they will take. With hundreds of these individuals in the hives, how quickly could they devastate an area? We’ve even seen them taking small dragonflies.
‘They have the potential to devastate huge areas of insects, not just bees.’
Mr Tompkins added that Asian hornets provide ‘no benefit at all’ to the Island’s ecosystem.
‘They are totally destructive,’ he said.
‘We’re only going to be able to limit the damage these things can do, never eradicate or control them, and in the next five years, it will reach the stage where we can’t even do that.
‘If a nest is in a school complex, a hospital, care home, those will be the ones taken out, but individual houses are going to have to pay for pest control to take it out otherwise,’ Mr Tompkins added.
