Vespa velutina season is here — how are you monitoring and reporting this autumn?
September in Provence means the yellow-legged hornets have found my apiary again. The secondary nests are at full strength now and the hawking has started — hornets hovering 30 cm in front of the entrances, picking off returning foragers in the air. Two of my eight colonies have already gone into foraging paralysis, bees bearding at the entrance and refusing to fly.
My setup this year: entrance muzzles (wire mesh cages) on every hive so the bees have protected approach, and I keep monitoring traps out mainly to gauge pressure, not as control — the bycatch on open traps is terrible and trapping barely dents a nest of thousands.
What's the picture further north? UK and Belgian friends — are the reporting apps actually leading to nest destruction near you, or do reports vanish into a void?
#asian-hornet#vespa-velutina#hawking#monitoring
▲ 11 votes💬 4 replies
4 replies
BuckfastLinda · Sep 2, 2026
Flanders here — velutina is fully established now, no pretending otherwise. Reports go through Vespa-Watch and the regional teams do still destroy nests when they can find them, which is the hard part since primary nests are hidden and secondary ones are 15 m up a poplar. The track-and-trace method works best: bait station, time the hornet's return flights, follow the bearing. Tedious but it's how most nests near me got found.
DevonBees_Em · Sep 2, 2026
Devon report: sightings here get logged on the Asian Hornet Watch app and the NBU does respond — the UK is still trying containment rather than living-with-it, so every credible report gets chased. Most activity is still Kent and the south coast but everyone's told to photograph and report, not swat. LavenderSophie, the muzzles — do your bees adapt to them quickly? Fitting some as insurance.
InesMel · Sep 3, 2026
Alentejo is still mostly clear but the north of Portugal has lived with velutina for years and it is moving south. What the northern associations learned: spring queen trapping sounds clever but the bycatch of native insects is huge and the evidence it reduces nests is weak. Muzzles and autumn nest destruction is where the effort pays.
LavenderSophie · Sep 3, 2026
DevonBees_Em — a day or two of confusion at the muzzle, then they treat it as a porch. Fit them BEFORE hawking starts if you can, a stressed colony adapts slower. And BuckfastLinda is right about track-and-trace, we found last year's nest 200 m from the apiary that way, 18 metres up a plane tree. The pompiers would not touch it; a licensed destroyer did.