What do you know about the murder hornet?
Um, yeah, the world's ending.
Do you think the murder hornet has the potential
to wipe out bees?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, this happens to be the actual spot
where the entire colony was wiped out.
So if suddenly we have Asian giant hornets,
it's going to hurt us,
but it's going to hurt everyone in the entire country.
We're walking along the border. Sorry, one second. One second.
We're walking along the highly secure border
between the United States of America and Canada,
hunting for the potentially dangerous murder hornet.
Vaping illness blamed for...
ANTIFA is carrying...
...cigarettes...
As parents, you should know.
As clickbait headlines warp our view of the world,
we're going down the rabbit hole to ask how afraid
should we really be?
On this episode, the media's entomophobia
of the murder hornet.
♪♪
A new type of insect has arrived in the US.
Dubbed the murder hornet
for its powerful sting and the way of decapitates its prey.
What makes the hornets even more terrifying
is the threat they pose to humans.
Their stings can deliver nearly seven times
the amount of venom as a honeybee.
As if 2020 hadn't made us anxious enough,
now we have giant hornets in the Pacific Northwest.
I wanted to see if everyone there was panicking.
So I flew to Seattle to meet up with local beekeeper
Peter Nolte, who loves his bees, loves his honey.
The Pinehurst neighborhood honey
has a lot of linden nectar in it.
The Broadview neighborhood honey, more blackberry blossom.
If you see something labeled as wildflower,
that's the beekeeper saying, "I don't know what that is.
It's wildflower."
We do not currently have Asian giant hornets this far south.
Currently, they're all up pretty close to the border.
Last fall, some Asian giant hornets
were found both in Canada
and just on the Washington side of the Canadian border.
So when we started hearing from friends, family,
customers back in May,
you know, "What's going on with the murder hornets?"
First of all, we were like, "What's a murder hornet?"
The New York Times first wrote about
The Asian giant hornets' North American debut
at the end of 2019 to little fanfare.
It wasn't until this May, at the height of the pandemic,
did they release a second article
using the provocative nickname the "murder hornet"
did this story become the clickbait headline
that doubled down on 2020.
Even though the Washington State Department of Agriculture
had only 18 confirmed sightings over the year,
a whole bunch of people think they've spotted them.
Looking through the USDA's Facebook page,
you can see post after post of false sightings.
I even found someone on Reddit
that claims they found one in New York City.
Asian giant hornets were first found in Canada,
but could have crossed over the border to the US.
So it drove up to Blaine, Washington,
to see if I could spot them flying over.
What the heck is this?
[ Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" plays ]
Hello, Canadians. So exotic.
The murder hornet doesn't care about these dang borders.
It just goes back and forth as it pleases.
Have you seen murder hornets crossing the border?
Have you seen the murder hornets crossing the border?
Have you seen one?
I've seen some very big-ass,
like, bald-faced hornets this year.
Actually, to be honest with you,
I thought it was so I just sent it to its Neverland.
[ Both chuckle ]
-You killed it? -You're damn right.
There's probably plenty of other stuff
we should be afraid of at the moment,
other than the murder hornets.
Surprisingly, nobody seemed too panicked up here.
That changed after I met Ted McFall, a beekeeper
whose colony was massacred by the hornets this spring.
After suiting up, he took me to the scene of the crime.
So, yeah, talk to me about the day
that you came out here.
Yeah, so I was expecting it to be just a normal day,
just to have a look at my bees,
make sure everything's ready for the winter.
And as I came rolling up,
I noticed a dark spot in front of this colony.
And so, that's when I knew,
uh-oh, there's probably a problem.
And so whenever I showed up and I saw all the dead bees
everywhere and they had been decapitated,
I thought, "Ohh, you know, maybe there are still
some survivors inside it."
So that's when I opened it up, and unfortunately not.
Everything was dead.
Trying to save his bees from further annihilation,
Ted has set up a series of traps to catch the murder hornet.
So, it has to be big enough for them to fit in,
but it has to be small enough
to make it tough for them to get out.
You just put it through a strainer,
and then you see what you got.
Oh my God. Oh, there's one alive in there.
Here's what we have in this particular trap.
You see a lot of these yellowjackets,
which they're looking for a lot of the same things
that the murder hornet's going to be looking for.
This one happens to be a native hornet.
Wow, you can see its stinger out there.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. -That's a big one.
They have big stingers, nothing compared
to the murder hornet, though.
That is a big stinger, and that freaks me out.
So I have no idea what would happen
if I saw a murder hornet's stinger.
Yep. You see some people that say, "Well, you know,
they deal with them in Asia, and everything's okay there.
So probably everything's going to be okay here, too."
But that's not really a fair comparison, because in Asia,
the bees have evolved with the Asian giant hornets.
So they're able to defend themselves.
Here, the bees have no idea what this creature is,
and they have no way of defending themselves.
Ted is part of a greater community of citizen scientists
who have put out more than 1,400 traps across the region.
A small team of state entomologists
have set out an additional 700.
But is that enough?
Hoping to get a straight answer
on how dire the situation really is,
I met up with Dr. Chris Looney
as he checks some of this official state traps,
which honestly didn't look
any more advanced than Ted's DIY ones.
So normally, when we survey for exotic pests,
we are putting out pheromone lures
that are known to be biologically attractive.
We have these...
It's one of those things where in its native range,
people have been dealing with it for, you know, millennia.
That's where we got these bottle designs for it.
People use this in Japan and Korea and stuff
just as a commercial -- or a cottage kind of approach
to trapping them.
There's never been a real need or the incentive
to develop something more biologically sophisticated.
So, yeah, we're kind of running blind.
Do you feel, like, a sense of urgency right now
to try and trap these things or get some plans in action?
This is a species that is really well adapted
to living in the environment at large, right?
They're social insects, they are good at setting up nests,
they are good at foraging for food.
The longer we take to try and eradicate it,
the harder and harder it's going to be.
So, yeah, we got to act fast, and kind of like coronavirus,
we're stymied by not having the most effective tools.
We do know that in every single case where a species,
an invasive species becomes established,
it would have been cheaper to get rid of it
than to deal with it, so...
So that's what you're trying to trying to do.
So that's what I'm trying to do.
♪♪
Should people across the country be afraid
that these murder hornets will show up in their backyard?
I don't think anybody should be afraid.
And this insect, we don't really know much
about how it disperses,
but we think it could reach Oregon in less than 20 years,
maybe more like 10 if it flies similar
to a species that's invading Europe right now.
So you're trying to sort of squash the panic a little bit.
Yeah, don't be afraid.
So, initially, we were concerned that the human death rate
was, like, a lot higher than it has turned out to be.
In the last couple of decades,
it's been maybe a dozen people die from all stinging insects,
which is not much different than what we already have here.
So it seems like the risk to humans is low
and people should bury their entomophobia and focus
on all the other important stuff they got going on right now,
which is -- there's no shortage of that.
This isn't worth putting in the peak 2020 pantheon
of shit that's happened.
No, I think we should put it in there.
But it's less important than racial justice,
dealing with economic inequality,
dealing with a huge pathogen.
There's all this other stuff going on
that is going to impact all of us
much more immediately than this.
This series is about critiquing the media
and how clickbait headlines invoke fear.
As much as I would love to hate on The New York Times
for using such an incendiary headline, I must give it credit.
Asian giant hornets are an issue,
and they are part of a continued history of invasive species
that needs to be reined in.
To use a headline that gets people to pay attention
to an issue that requires an engaged community
is a proper use of clickbait.
And even if everyone around the country
thinks they've seen a murder hornet but really haven't,
at least they're looking and paying attention.