A new challenge for beekeeping: The Vespa velutina
The Asian Hornet (Vespa velutina) is an invasive and aggressive hornet species that causes massive damage to apiaries and orchards in France, and has expanded to other European countries. It can be assumed that the expansion of the Vespa velutina will continue further.
The ECODESIGN company is a partner in the ERASMUS+ project "Education, Training and Capacity-Building in the Field of Beekeeping and Civil Defense Service", to develop a comprehensive knowledge campaign to raise capacities amongst stakeholders to monitor, prevent, and control the spread of the Asian hornet.
We first released the German version of the Technical Guideline with measures on Monitoring, Controlling and Preventing the Asian hornet Vespa velutina end of 2022.
With 6 chapters attractively layouted, we present the current approaches from various countries and latest information from leading scientific organizations for identifying, tracking, and controlling this invasive species. We also discuss the learnings and the specific recommendations for the beekeepers to get prepared to act.In 2023 the translation of our Technical guide to French, English and Slovak is complete.
Now it is available in PDF, in four languages!
- in German
- in Slovak (with a section on the biology of the Vespa velutina)
- in English (with a section on the biology of the Vespa velutina), and
- in French.
This technical guide forms the basis for international workshops to train firefighters, beekeepers, and civil defense organizations to detect and control Vespa.
Our recent presentation of the technical guide took place in September 2023 at the Beekeeping conference in Banská Bistrica. (The program is available here, only in Slovak language).
Information about this project is published here, and the project partners are the beekeeping school in Banská Bystrica (SK), the French beekeeping experts from ApiSaveurs, and the Czech beekeeping experts from PSNV.
The project is funded within the EU program ERASMUS+ under the grant number: 2021-1-SK01-KA220-VET-000033144 (Duration: 01.11.2021 - 2023).
Photo right: Vespa velutina nest (CZ, 2023). Photo credit: Hasičský záchranný sbor Plzeňského kraje: https://www.irozhlas.cz/veda-technologie/priroda/srsen-asijska-hnizdo-plzen_2310092114_mst#:~:text=https%3A//irozhl.as/nan.
