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Dylan Thuras: Chris Looney is an entomologist for the state of Washington. He works for the Department of Agriculture. When someone in the state spots something that they’ve never seen before, some strange insect or mysterious nest, they contact Chris.
Chris Looney: A grandma that calls me up with a weird fly in her house, I can tell you what that fly is and I can also work on molecular analysis of a beetle that shows up in the state to tell you where that beetle came from. We do lots of different things.
Dylan: Chris has received thousands of messages from this sort of insect hotline. So he’s seen his share of interesting bugs. But one day in December of 2019, he received a photo that he was hoping he would never see.
Chris: I was at a meeting in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which is just over the border from Washington. I got an email and it was a picture of this giant hornet curled up on somebody’s porch, and it was instantaneous. We knew exactly what it was, and it was definitely a heart sinking moment.
Dylan: Here’s the thing. This is not your grandma’s hornet. This is something else entirely. The picture was of the Asian giant hornet. It is unmistakable. It is two inches long with a three-inch wingspan. It’s covered in brown and orange stripes, and it’s got these huge eyes. Like, it is a little bit of a monster. And the hornet has a reputation in the entomology world. It’s nicknamed the murder hornet. It’s native to Asia, and it has an appetite for bees, but not just one bee at a time. It has an appetite for destroying entire beehives. And a single nest had been found just across the way in Canada. But Chris and his team had hoped that they would not find their way across the border, that maybe they would just stay put. But apparently, their luck had run out.
Chris: I had hoped we had dodged that bullet, and now we have to figure out how to deal with this bullet.
I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today, Chris takes us on a hunt for what you might call an entomologist’s most wanted insect.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Dylan: This all started in November of 2019 on Vancouver Island. A small group of Canadian beekeepers found this strange nest in the woods. In the dead of night, armed with headlamps and a fire extinguisher, they destroyed the hive, this hive full of Asian giant hornets.
Chris: That was the first nest of that species reported, I would say, outside of its native range ever. So kind of a big deal.
Dylan: It was a big deal. Somehow, the giant hornet had showed up 5,000 miles—ocean away—from its home environment. How the hornet made it to Canada is still something of a mystery. Maybe some stowed away on a cargo ship. Maybe they caught a ride in an international package. What mattered now was that the hornet was here. And on the plus side, that the Canadians had been able to destroy the nest.
Chris: So we were all sort of like, oh, that’s a relief, right? We don’t have to worry about it. Or so we thought.
Dylan: You know how in a horror movie at the end, when it seems like it’s all settled, there’s that one more jump scare? Yeah. Well, just one month later, Chris would receive that heart sinking photo from a resident in Blaine. Blaine, Washington is a charming little town. It sits in the Northwest corner of the state in Whatcom County. And it’s the quintessential Pacific Northwestern town. Nestled in the foothills of the Cascade mountain range, cradled by Puget Sound, the city was once home to the world’s largest salmon cannery. From the harbor, you can see across the way into Canada. And it was perhaps this proximity that may have opened up Blaine to the murder hornet. In that emailed photo, the hornet on the porch was already dead, but the tipster had also spotted a live one. It had flown up to his hummingbird feeder before escaping into the surrounding forest. I mean, at two inches long, it’s practically a bird. Anyway, this would mark the first live sighting of a murder hornet in Washington state. But there would be more, much more. It was not just the scientists who were finding signs of these giant hornets. Beekeepers across the state started seeing their own clues.
Chris: One of them was a really experienced beekeeper and he had never seen anything like this. And he basically came home to a hive where all the bees had just been cut in half, which is weird.
Dylan: His beehive was empty. The decapitated bodies of his bees were scattered on the ground all around it. Chris and his team had questions. There were a lot of unknowns. Where were these hornets hiding? Were there hives out there? Did they reach beyond Blaine? How would an Asian hornet navigate the forested landscape of Washington? What he did know was that the hornet stood out. It’s half the size of a hummingbird. Imagine something the size of your thumb landing on your shoulder. Slightly terrifying. Chris also knew that these hornets could be really quite aggressive. They attack beehives because they’re looking for food to feed their babies.
Chris: They will go to beehives and other wasp nests and conduct these sort of mass raids. Instead of catching an individual bee, they just kill all of the adults that might mount some sort of defense of that hive or that nest. And the hornets go nuts.
Dylan: Like, imagine the movie Braveheart. You know, Mel Gibson with the blue face paint, the field surrounded by his men, gives a big speech and then they start running at full speed to overtake the other army. It’s like that, except they’re hornets.
Chris: They come in and they do this thing where they catch a bee, they kill it, they move on. Catch a bee, kill it, move on. Catch a bee, kill it, move on. Catch it—it’s just like full go, go, go, go.
Dylan: It’s so intense that the hornets can expend so much energy that they actually die during these raids. This was, of course, a huge problem for beekeepers and natural bee populations. And it wasn’t great for humans either. A sting from the Asian giant hornet is really quite nasty. The nickname murder hornet starts to make a lot of sense. Now, not every introduced species becomes a problem. But Chris and his team did not want to take this chance. They were up against a kind of biological deadline. They needed to find these nests and these queens. And they needed to find them before they could reproduce.
Chris: I think for me, mostly you’re worried about, like, just not succeeding. You don’t want to get stung, of course. The hornets, they’re just doing what hornets do. That’s not a big deal. It’s thinking how daunting it is to try and find a nest that they hide in a landscape that is forested, that is primarily private land, so you can’t just traipse across and do whatever you want. Like, that’s the stuff that is in your head the whole time.
Dylan: Chris and his team needed to come up with a plan. And there was some research out there. Scientists in Asia had studied the hornet. It was a native species there. So Chris looked to their findings to try and figure out how to combat or control these hornet populations.
Chris: Basically, we relied on what people in the native range, like, do, which is hanging mimosas in trees.
Dylan: Here is the plan the team came up with. Find the nest of these giant hornets and eliminate them. It really is the plot line from a horror movie. It also—it sounds, at least in theory, pretty straightforward. But to kill a hive, you have to know where it is. The search area covered over 2,000 square miles. They needed to narrow that down and establish a perimeter for the hunt. And that is where these little hornet mimosas come into the story, tiny little mimosas. Hornets, as it turns out, love brunch. So Chris and his team stirred up mixes of orange juice and rice wine, and they would hang up these little fermented fruit traps in as many trees as they could, all just hoping that the hornets would come and stop by for a sip. But to cover such a huge area, Chris also knew they needed backup. And so they enlisted the help of the public to report any sightings. There were social media posts. There were billboards plastered with the face of the Asian giant hornet. There were even nightly news reports. And as you might expect, it kind of went viral.
Reporter One: Back now with what’s called murder hornets, reported in the U.S. for the first time.
Reporter Two: Governor Greg Abbott is launching a task force to combat the murder hornet in case they arrive in Texas.
Reporter Three: We encourage the public, and beekeepers, and agencies, and border patrol folks, and the RCMP, and everybody else to have their eyes open.
Dylan: People were on the lookout for the hornet, even way outside of Washington state. Thousands of tips poured into the sightings hotline.
Chris: We had 7,000 sightings submitted in that first year. And that was everywhere. I mean, we had some from the Azores. We had one from Saudi Arabia. I mean, it was all over the place. Mostly the United States and adjacent Canada. And then once we sort of restricted it to Washington and British Columbia, which is where we were worried about, it was still 4,400 submissions. Only 20 of those were actually hornets.
Dylan: Nonetheless, these public sightings were a key piece to the entire campaign. It was all about having eyes all over the state. Now, Chris and his team were ready for the next step. Capture a live hornet and tag it with a tiny radio transmitter. Hopefully, that hornet would lead them back to the nest. This was not an easy task. Roughly eight months after the first sighting on the porch, the team finally caught their first live hornet.
Chris: And yeah, that was super exciting. This is what we’ve been waiting for, like all summer long.
Dylan: Turns out, gluing a radio transmitter onto a murder hornet, it’s not so easy either.
Chris: We put a tag on it and it was a total disaster.
Dylan: Chris went through hornet after hornet. The transmitters would fall off. The hornet couldn’t fly. The hornets were just tired and worn out and they just refused to do anything. After a month, they were finally able to attach a tag to a hornet and then watch and wait. Try to see where this hornet would go. The tagged hornets made it back to the hive. They tracked it to a piece of private property and eventually they found the hive itself, hidden in a hollowed out tree. Under the cover of darkness, Chris and his team carefully approached the hive. Outfitted in padded protective suits, they looked like visitors from another planet. They sucked out the hornets from the nest using a shop vac.
Chris: By the time we got to that first nest, it was too late. There were all kinds of new queens or new giants, as we call them, hanging out in the nest. There had already been a few that had flown out. The landowner had some in his dog’s water dish. Like we got it too late, probably two weeks too late.
Dylan: They captured nearly 100 queens out of this hive, but they suspected that there were still some out there, some who had gotten away and were now building their own hives. For three long years, Chris and his team repeated this process over and over again. And the public kept vigilant the entire time, scanning the forest, sending murder hornet sightings. Chris was learning more and more about these hornets each year. The team was finally able to find and destroy four hives. And over time, the sightings got fewer and fewer. In December of 2024, exactly five years after the first sighting, Washington State officially declared the eradication of the murder hornet.
Chris: It was one of the most rewarding things I have done as a public servant, having everybody invested in working on this together. To some level, it was probably because people are afraid of stinging insects, right? If this had been like, not the murder hornet, but the like graffiti beetle, it probably would not have had the same draw.
Dylan: But the natural world is not easy to predict. And the Asian giant hornet appeared mysteriously just one day out of the blue. So it is within the realm of possibility that it could happen again. Anyone who’s seen a horror movie knows that there is going to be a sequel. So, tip line, still open. And Chris and his team are still watching.
Chris: And every year that there’s no hornets found, you feel a little bit more hopeful, but yeah, there’s always the other shoe.
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Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. This episode was produced by Alexa Lim. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Beaudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.