Asian Giant Hornets
This man is not your ordinary farmer. While others might work with cows or chickens, Mister Yu runs an Asian Giant Hornet (Vespa mandarina) farm outside of Dali in the Yunnan province of China. The project started seven years ago but it was just three years ago things started to run smoothly.
”Before we started doing this, nobody knew how to. We have had to learn a lot, like feeding routines, how to keep the queens alive and fertile, when to harvest larvae and everything else that comes with farming.”
As to why one would even want to do this in the first place, there are two reasons. The first one being a genuine interest in the hornets and the second one being the chinese market. There is a possibility to make a lot of profit selling the larvae who are filled with protein and used in both chinese medicine and food as well as the venom producing adult workers who are drowned in alcohol to make a medicinal beverage believed to be good for joint pain. On the market he can for example get 150 yuan (20 euro) for 500g of larvae. ”We sell queens for 100 yuan and colonies for 1800 yuan per group. We can pack it in a box with oxygen and ice packs and then send by express.” The buyers of these packages are mostly hobbyists and people who want to start their own farm.
While insect protein can be an important solution to feeding a constantly growing human population, there are a lot of risks that comes with farming of the Asian giant hornet, and not just for the people who get stung working with them. As they are extremely predatory, they can completely destroy entire bee colonies in just a few hours, making them very dangerous for ecosystems when introduced in new areas. This is well known and many European countries have been developing methods to stop them from spreading after the species accidentally was introduced to France in 2004.
For now, we can only hope that this business can continue to evolve sustainably without the species spreading even more, but on the loosely regulated Chinese market these farmers may very well be playing with fire. Or worse, playing with Asian giant hornets.
