Yellow legged hornets stalk honeybees like serial killers.
They hover near hives and wait for pollen laden bees to return from foraging. Then, the hornets ambush and dismember the bees, devouring only the thorax (the middle) which they fed to their young.
Longtime beekeeper David Arnal of Hilton Head Island says his colonies have become crime scenes with honeybees reluctant to leave home.
“They watch their sisters get eaten on the way back in and they effectively hunker down,” says Arnal.
The predator
Arnal says he’s lost numerous colonies to this invasive species of hornet that began preying upon South Carolina and Georgia's Lowcountry two years ago. He farms out bees from his apiary to pollinate produce.
“I’ve had farmers come and watch the hornets eat the bees and weep,” says Arnal. “It’s just so sad.”
Brad Cavin with Clemon University leads the state's yellow-legged hornet response team. He's trying to stop the spread of this predator.
"My number one question is what's going to happen to agriculture," he says. “If we don’t have pollinators doing their job by helping create food for us, then we’ve got a problem."
Cavin says the yellow-legged hornet, originally from Asia, found its way into Spain in 2004 and has since gotten a foothold in continental Europe. He says the neon-legged predator first appeared in the United States in Georgia in 2023, most likely after hitchhiking aboard a cargo ship. A year later, the hornet was spotted in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, with Beaufort County being ground zero.
Cavin says that first year, in 2024, his team removed 16 yellow-legged hornet nests. This year, they've destroyed roughly 500.
“This is the perfect location for an invasive species like this to take hold,” says Cavin.
Cavin says there is plenty of food and cover in the Lowcountry for this bee butcher to thrive. In fact, he says, the hornets will eat almost anything. The team finds them diving into trash cans and dining on roadkill. Cavin says the hornets need carbohydrates and protein.
Catching a killer
In the Spring, his team puts out jugs of bait he calls “Georgia juice", a sticky concoction of dark brown sugar mixed with white grape juice. The goal is to kill the queens emerging from hibernation before they can build nests and breed. This year, he says, the team killed more than 4,000 queens.
During the summer, Cavin and teammates, like Caroline Oatley, try to kill hornets and remove their nests. The two make the nearly 4-hour-drive from the Upstate several times a month. Cavin says it can be difficult to gain access to gated communities, and many homeowners don’t live on the sea islands year-round.
On this day, Oatley tries to track the neon legged killers by catching them near an old church in Bluffton where honeybees cower along a wall. The bees are being stalked or "hawked" as the teams calls it. Oatley is armed with a paint pin and net.
“So, I got her,” says Oatley. “I’ve got her pinned down.”
Oatley carefully paints the hornet’s belly bright orange as it squirms. Then, she releases it, watches, and waits.
“We’re going to see how many minutes it takes for her to come back,” says Oatley. “And that’ll potentially give us a closer location of where the nest is.”
But hornet nests can be hard to find even though some grow as large as an exercise ball. The light brown lairs are often tucked beneath the eaves of a roof or are hidden in trees by palm fronds and Spanish Moss.
Nate Krelis, with Hilton Head Exterminators, frequently works with the Clemson team. He dons a protective suit before facing off with angry hornets. Unlike honeybees, yellow-legged hornets don’t lose their stingers and die after an attack. They can sting repeatedly.
“I’m going to use a piece of sponge to cover the hole and stop them from leaving,” says Krelis as he sets up a ladder beneath a Hilton Head Island porch.
Destroying nests
Krelis injects a grapefruit size nest with an insecticide. There’s an audible hum from inside its oyster shell-like, paper layers.
“That noise you can hear is like the chewing sound from all of the larva that hasn’t developed into adult hornets,” says Cavin. “They’re like, ‘feed me, feed me’”.
Bigger nests are often a beyond ladder’s reach. That’s when the team calls in arborists and trees climbers who use specialized gear to catapult as high as 100 feet. The climbers remove huge hornet high-rises by cutting branches attached to the nests.
But even a downed nest can be dangerous.
“If they do interact with people, you’re not talking about two or three hornets,” says Cavin. “It could be over 1,000."
Removing nests is not only dangerous, but costly. Cavin says the price for just one nest can be as high as $3,000.
Once removed, the nests are collected in large garbage bags and stored in freezers at the team’s Ridgeland warehouse. Cavin says he freezes the nests for at least 72 hours to make sure all the hornets are dead. The team also collects hornet bodies in jars for further study.
“We’re seeing that yellow-legged hornets can be introduced in any region,” says Oatley. “It’s just a matter of will it succeed? Will it be able to officially establish itself there?”
The response team has removed nests several hours away in York County. And there have been reports of a yellow-legged hornet on a ship in Vancouver, Washington.
Back on Hilton Head Island, Mike Lewis says he worried about snakes and alligators when he moved his family to the Lowcountry from Virginia. Now he finds himself constantly looking up. His wife has spotted three large nests.
“It’s scary,” he says. “We have granddaughters. We want to protect them.”
Calvin and his team rely heavily on public reporting. They urge South Carolinians to use Clemson’s online reporting tool to share what they see. He says education is one of the most effective weapons in eradicating this elusive and aggressive predator.