AGW is being sited as the cause for a deadly increase in the number of Giant Hornets in China:

Chen pointed with a shaky hand at the small plot of cabbage, scallions and corn where his friend Yu Yihong was stung to death by giant hornets.

“When he got to the hospital, there were still two hornets in his trousers,” says Chen, a local farmer who, like many villagers, declined to give his full name to a foreign journalist. “The hornets’ poison was too strong - his liver and kidneys failed, and he couldn’t urinate.”

Yu, a square-jawed 40-year-old farmer in perfect health, had been harvesting his crops when he stepped on a nest of vespa mandarinia hornets concealed beneath a pile of dry corn husks. The hornets swarmed Yu, stinging him through his long-sleeve shirt and trousers. He ran, but the hornets chased him, stinging his arms and legs, his head and neck.

After Yu succumbed to his wounds and about 50 of his friends and relatives gathered to mourn his passing. Outside the farmer’s mountainside home in Yuanba village, they ate preserved eggs, buckwheat noodles and boiled peanuts in silence; one set off a string of fireworks. Yu’s wife and two children sat inside weeping.

Vespa mandarinia is the world’s largest hornet, around the size of a human adult’s thumb, yellow and black in colour and highly venomous. Their 6mm-long stingers carry a venom potent enough to dissolve human tissue. Victims may die of kidney failure or anaphylactic shock.

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Both locals and experts blame this year’s scourge on climate change; the past year has been unusually warm, allowing a high number of hornets to survive the winter. Huang Ronghui, an official at the Ankang Forestry Bureau’s pest control department, lists a host of other possibilities: the hornets may have been agitated by a dry spell, while labourers have been moving deeper and deeper into the mountains, disturbing their nests. “Other than this, hornets are attracted to bright colours and the smell of peoples’ sweat, alcohol and sweet things,” he told state media. “They’re sensitive to movement, such as running people or animals.”

Image: vespa-mandarinia-008.jpg