Insect scientists, state agriculture departments, nature writers and everyone else perceived to hold expertise in stinging insects have been inundated with requests for identification of bugs that look like murder hornets ever since the first giant Asian hornet was found in North America in 2020.
The insect that has generated the majority of those mistaken-identity queries has been the European hornet.
It’s a native of Europe that found its way to North America in the 1840s and most likely had spread across all of Pennsylvania by 1900, but many Pennsylvania seem to be now noticing the inch-and-a-quarter-long wasp for the first time.
Many of the requests for identification in Pennsylvania find their way to Michael Skvarla, assistant research professor of arthropod identification at Penn State and the expert who fields those queries from the university’s Department of Entomology Insect Identification Form.
In an article in the next issue of “American Entomologist, Skvarla recounts the increase in European hornet-related queries he has seen: From an average of 16 per year in 2017 through 2019 to 409 in 2020, the initial murder hornet year in the media.
“It absolutely went through the roof,” he recalled.
While large wasp concerns are maintaining the level of queries well above their pre-murder hornet levels, the numbers have dropped substantially.
Skvarla fielded 168 European hornet queries last year and said this year is shaping up similarly. This week, as of yesterday, he had received about 25 queries.
He believes the increased level of queries that seem to be the new norm is more a result of heightened awareness of the part of many Pennsylvanians rather than a reflection of an increase in the European hornet population in the state.
“Some of it is (the murder hornet story) staying in the news,” he explained. “People may have seen them previously and just thought it was a big wasp and ignored it.”
He noted that “we don’t have historic data… either geographic or abundance-wise” to determine if there has been an increase in the population, but “the short answer is no.
“I don’t see them exploding in the last few years, just at the time” that the murder hornet story was hitting the media.
If there was an increase in the European hornet population it would have taken place across decades rather than suddenly in a year or two, Skvarla explained.
In addition to heightened public awareness of large hornets, “people are encountering them more frequently.”
European hornets need hollow trees for their nests, which leads them to be found in forests and at the edge of forests, where new houses are being built at a steady pace.
In addition, there are some indications that the insects are appearing more regularly in orchards, where they supplement their diet by feeding on fruit.
Another species that generates many mistaken murder hornet queries is the two-inch-long eastern cicada killer, but it leads to far fewer reports than the European hornet. The hornet is the source of two to 10 times as many queries as the cicada killer each year.
Contact Marcus Schneck at mschneck@pennlive.com.