Bee-eating Chinese hornets spread through France

PARIS (Reuters) – France is facing an invasion of bee-eating Chinese hornets which could hasten the mysterious decline in the honey-bee population and threaten bee-keepers’ livelihoods, researchers said on Tuesday.

Colonies of Asian hornets, or Vespa velutina, have spread rapidly in southwestern France, a region popular with tourists, and are likely to reach other European countries soon. “More and more of them are coming and they’re colonizing France,” Quentin Rome, a researcher at the National History Museum in Paris, told Reuters. The three centimeter-long insects, recognizable by their orange heads and yellow feet, probably arrived in France on a boat carrying ceramic goods from China, researchers believe. The first hornets were observed in France in 2004, and the most recent study recorded 1,100 nests across the country. The hornet is now firmly established near Bordeaux and has advanced as far north as parts of Brittany in northwestern France. “They multiply quite quickly, and they settle in a new department every year,” Rome said. …