Asian Hornet aka Yellow Legged Hornet
The Asian Hornet is now being referred to as the Yellow Legged Hornet as it’s more descriptive and it’s believed will help the public to positively identify the invasive hornet from our native European Hornet.
So far in 2025 seven individual Yellow Legged Hornets have been positively identified then collected by a Bee Inspector and sent away for DNA testing. This is to see if they’re related to any nests found and destroyed in previous years which would mean that queen hornets had successfully been raised in the UK and survived the winter.
On 16th April 2025 a keen eyed member of the public spotted an embryo nest being built on a window frame in Langley, a photo was sent in via the Asian Hornet Watch app and the Bee Inspector killed and removed the queen hornet sending it away for testing.
Langley isn’t too far from Marden so I have monitoring traps out as do other bee keepers in the area. The National Bee Unit will also have set up monitoring traps around the Langley area which will hopefully catch anymore hornets. At this time of year all hornets caught will be queens, either over wintered or a new migrant queen that could have arrived in a car, lorry, caravan etc..
More information about Yellow Legged Hornets including indentification photo’s etc can be found on the National Bee Unit’s Beebase website
https://www.nationalbeeunit.com/about-us/beekeeping-news/yellow-legged-hornet-2025-rolling-update
https://www.nationalbeeunit.com/diseases-and-pests/asian-hornet