What’s been called a “murder hornet” or “Asian giant hornet” now has a somewhat official, maybe kinder, name. Meet the northern giant hornet.
That’s what the Entomological Society of America, or ESA, announced July 25 as the preferred plain-English common name for the big, orange-and-black Vespa mandarinia. The choice has at least as much to do with people as it does with hornets.
It’s a celebrity as insects go. By 2019, the species had hitchhiked across the Pacific and was already nesting in Canada probably also on the U.S. side of the border. News stories exclaimed over hornet queens as long as a human thumb and the hornets’ late summer raiding parties that mass-slaughter whole hives of adult honeybees to steal the chubby larvae as wasp food. V. mandarinia became the doomsday spirit insect for the start of COVID-19 times (SN: 5/29/20). As of late July, there have been no confirmed sightings this year of the hornet in Washington, the state at the center of the buzz in the United States, but trapping efforts are under way.
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