As everyone loses their minds over drones in New Jersey and bird flu in the world’s henhouses, it might pay to remember some of the scares of media-political yore that have come and gone.
Does anyone remember ‘Yellow Rain’? No, it wasn’t a cheap, K-pop ripoff of a Prince movie, nor some unspeakable Hollywood fetish. Rather, in late ’70s, people in Vietnam and Laos began noticing that a sticky yellow liquid periodically rained down from otherwise sunny skies. Witnesses claimed the strange substance killed plants and sickened people. It being south-east Asia in the late ’70s, thoughts naturally turned to biological weapons.
In a conclusion eerily reminiscent of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, the US government concluded that it was a chemical weapon made by the Soviets. In fact, it eventually transpired that the dastardly substance was… bee shit. It turns out that, on hot days (which is when reports of ‘Yellow Rain’ were most common) bees would take off in giant swarms, have a literal flying shit and buzz home.
Oddly, the US government has never officially admitted it was wrong.
If bees weren’t scary enough, how about hornets? Specifically, the so-called ‘murder hornets’ that were such big news just a couple of years back.
Gone, baby, gone.
The world’s largest hornet, an invasive breed dubbed the “murder hornet” for its dangerous sting and ability to slaughter a honey bee hive in a matter of hours, has been declared eradicated in the US, five years after being spotted for the first time in Washington state near the Canadian border.
Unlike ‘Yellow Rain’, murder hornets were at least real. They were also at least a potential threat to not just people but to pollinating bees and native bee populations. Their merciful disappearance from North America is the result of a dedicated effort to exterminate the brutes.
The Washington and US Departments of Agriculture announced the eradication Wednesday, saying there had been no detections of the northern giant hornet in Washington since 2021.
The news represented an enormous success that included residents agreeing to place traps on their properties and reporting sightings, as well as researchers capturing a live hornet, attaching a tiny radio tracking tag to it with dental floss, and following it through a forest to a nest in an alder tree. Scientists destroyed the nest just as a number of queens were just beginning to emerge, officials said.
“I’ve gotta tell you, as an entomologist – I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects,” Sven Spichiger, pest program manager of the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told a virtual news conference.
They were certainly nasty little buggers.
The hornets, which can be 2 inches (5 cm) long and were formerly called Asian giant hornets, gained attention in 2013, when they killed 42 people in China and seriously injured 1,675 […]
The hornets were first detected in North America in British Columbia, Canada, in August 2019 and confirmed in Washington state in December 2019, when a Whatcom County resident reported a specimen. A beekeeper also reported hives being attacked and turned over specimens in the summer of 2020. The hornets could have traveled to North America in plant pots or shipping containers, experts said […]
The hornet can sting through most beekeeper suits, deliver nearly seven times the amount of venom as a honey bee, and sting multiple times. At one point the Washington agriculture department ordered special reinforced suits from China.
Because, when you’re dealing with murder hornets, ‘Made in China’ is just what you’re looking for.
