ARMED with little more than a pair of binoculars and uncanny intuition, a Belgian man who has become known as the ‘Hornet Whisperer’ has helped Jersey smash all previous records for Asian hornet nest discoveries – more than double last year’s total.
As of Sunday, 530 nests had been found by trackers and members of the public reporting sightings. At the same time last year, 177 nests had been discovered.
Although hornet activity tends to quieten down at this time of year – when queens find places to hibernate – another 84 nests were discovered last autumn, giving a total of 261 for the year. The previous record of 339, set in 2023, has already been surpassed.
The last 12 nests were located in the past week by visiting Belgian tracker Dominique Soete, who has been dubbed the ‘Hornet Whisperer’ for his remarkable ability to spot nests using only his eyes and a small pair of binoculars.
Mr Soete is making his third trip to the Island this year, and holds Jersey’s efforts to control, and ideally eradicate, the Asian Hornet as an exemplar of best practice.
He has been particularly impressed by the partnership between volunteers and the government, and also the ingenuity of local trackers, which includes inventing and creating ‘wick-bait stations’. These attract insects but traps hornets while allowing other creatures, such as butterflies and moths, to escape as long as they are checked frequently.
He said: “Jersey is doing a good job, and I tell other trackers across Europe about how things are done here. Wick-bait stations are also now being used in Belgian, Holland, Switzerland and Germany.”
This weekend, Mr Soete gave a talk to around 25 Asian Hornet trackers about how he tracks the insects to and from their nests.
This involves, among other things, assessing their direction of flight, the height they are flying, going back to a spot at different times of the day, and looking at a potential nest location from different angles and elevations.
Jersey trackers will also have a new piece of technology to help them track nests, which will reach its annual zenith next May / June, when hornets leave their primary nests and start to build larger secondary nests, where most reproduction takes place.
Before then, in spring, the main activity for volunteers is to trap emerging queens before they have time to make embryonic nests.
1,400 queens were captured in the spring months this year.
The new technology has come from Holland and is called a Robor Nature Radio Tracker. Each set of kit, which includes tiny transmitters, tools to fix them on to hornets and hand-held direction-finders, costs 3,000 euro and one has been bought for the Jersey Asian Hornet Group by a local benefactor.
The transmitters, which each cost £75, can be recovered using a bait station which has a magnet attached. However, it is unlikely every transmitter will be recovered.
Group member John de Carteret said: “The equipment won’t replace the eye or intuition, but it is another tool in our toolkit. We tested it last week around Le Creux and we found a nest within an hour and a half.”
Once the volunteers have discovered nests, they are destroyed by the government’s Asian Hornet Coordinator Alastair Christie or by professional pest controllers.
