Recently, when we chatted, we talked about my wife being stung by a bee when she was a child. Although she only stung for a moment, she suddenly fainted and woke up for a long time.
(Photo caption: "Asian Killer Bee")
I said that she was really lucky, because she did not meet a particularly powerful bee, and there was only one, otherwise she would not be able to save her life. Just after saying that, when I looked at the news, the so-called killer bees appeared in the United States on the other side of the ocean. And this kind of bee, which has a very powerful name alone, comes from our Asia.
The so-called Asian killer bee, scientific name is called golden ring wasp, commonly known as the great tiger head bee. It is an animal of the order Hymenoptera, The Vespa family, a genus of wasps. Of course, wasps are not bees, but much more powerful than bees.
Just by looking at the size of the bee– the large tiger head bee is more than 40 mm long, or even close to 50 mm, almost as long as an adult's thumb, and the wingspan can reach 75 mm. Because of its yellow and black stripes similar to tigers, it is called the great tiger head wasp.
(Photo caption: Giant Golden Ring Wasp)
The great tiger head bee is also a social animal that usually begins nesting in the spring and takes about 5 months to build. The number of tiger-headed bees in a hive ranges from a few thousand to 20,000, and someone has even found a giant hive with a diameter of 1.3 meters, which contains more than 100,000 large tiger-headed wasps!
These tiger-headed bees were originally Asian creatures, but as transportation between countries around the world became more and more convenient, they were able to cross the ocean and come to the American continent to start a new life.
According to a report by the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA), a live killer bee was found on August 11. This has aroused great vigilance, because these wasps have already impressed them in the past year. At that time, the WSDA also specifically reminded the public on the official website to beware of the tiger bee, and warned the public not to be hard when they saw these animals, but to contact professionals to deal with them, otherwise they would be attacked.
(Photo caption: Last year, the WSDA official website prompted the public to beware of the big tiger bee)
Curiously, last year's killer bees suddenly disappeared after a long time in Washington State, and it is said that only 6 were caught in the local area that year, so it is unlikely that they died out due to human hunting.
And this time the comeback has also made people more vigilant. After all, it is unlikely that these killer bees will exist alone, and the discovery of one means that there is likely to be a large number of killer bees that have not been discovered. Therefore, Washington State has urgently begun to implement a siege and suppression plan, vowing to kill the harm that this group of killer bees may bring in the cradle.
These wasps are very powerful, attacking not only humans but also bees. The killer bee that was found this time was caught in the bee's hive when it "turned the river and the sea". Killer bees cut off the bees' heads and feed their cubs. At the fastest time, a wasp can bite 40 bees in 1 minute, and a group of wasps can even collectively break through the gate of the bee hive, and in just a few hours, the bees in a hive will be cut off from the door, killing the pieces of armor.
(Photo caption: The big tiger-headed bee slaughtering bees)
Not to mention these bees, even beekeepers, they are not afraid. Sometimes, they can even attack through the clothes of a beekeeper. According to statistics, in our neighboring country of Japan, 30-50 people are killed by this animal every year - the name of the killer bee is really not in vain!
In the 1980s, a farmer in the countryside of Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, was herding cattle when a buffalo was beaten by a group because he accidentally touched the hive of a tiger-headed bee. The farmer was very alert, and immediately jumped into the water, leaving only his nostrils to breathe outside, and escaped the disaster (of course, this behavior is also inappropriate, and it is easy to drown). Although the buffalo did not die at the time, he died when he returned home that night.
Tiger bees are powerful not only in their size, but also in their other weapon, Venom.
(Photo caption: Tiger-headed bee hunting rats)
The great tiger-headed bee is one of the five most poisonous bees in the world, and its toxicity can even be comparable to some poisonous snakes. Studies have shown that the venom of tiger-headed wasps contains bee venom peptides, histamine, hyaluronidase and other substances, which can cause symptoms such as redness, pain, dizziness, vomiting, diarrhea, etc. In severe cases, coma, hemolysis, acute renal failure and shock may occur, and some people with allergies may also have anaphylactic shock. So sometimes it's not unusual for a big tiger bee to kill people.
Last May, a Canadian beekeeper named Conrad Bellube was stabbed seven times by a giant tiger bee. According to him, the pain was "like being pierced into the flesh by a red-hot iron nail."
Whether it's slaughtering bees or killing humans, the great tiger-headed bee is indeed a headache invasive species for the United States. Todd Murray, a species invasion expert at the University of Washington, says, "It's a terrifying bumblebee."
(Photo caption: Comparison of the great tiger bee and human hands)
At present, no one knows why these killer bees came to the United States. As we have already introduced, there are only three ways of species invasion: natural transmission, intentional introduction and unintentional introduction. For killer bees, it is indeed difficult to cross the sea and spread naturally to the Americas, so the latter two are more likely.
For example, in 1957, a laboratory in Brazil accidentally leaked African killer bees. These killer bees quickly crossed with local wild bees, breeding a large number of ferocious bees, and even frantically attacking local residents, and later they spread all the way to the United States.
And, after all these years, it is likely that there is more than one source of killer bees in the United States. For example, the live killer bees found this month may have been "unintentionally introduced" by steamships.
(Photo caption: Tiger head bee body type display)
I have to say that these tiger-headed bees came to the United States and found the opportunity to dominate the king. In our country, although they also have a fairly powerful attack power, they are still a rush for some people. Especially in Yunnan Province and other places, many people will actively catch tiger bees to brew wine and use their bee venom to prevent or treat rheumatism. Bee venom is soluble in water, but not in alcohol, so when there is more bee venom, it will also form a yellow precipitate under the wine, which is quite beautiful.
They will use electric shock to extract bee venom from the bee venom, and 1000 professional bees can extract 2g of bee venom, which is 10 times the amount of bee venom. In September and November, some people burn the worker bees by fire, and then use them to make wine, which is numb and bitter to drink, and the bee pupae can be sold.
The so-called brine point tofu, one thing drops one thing. The killer bees that plague the Americas are "medicinal herbs" used to treat diseases in China. It seems that foreigners still do not like to eat as much as we do, and do not understand that the people take food as the sky. If they also understood that the tiger-headed bee could become food for humans, perhaps the American tiger-headed wasp would also have a headache.