Georgia Department of Agriculture hires staff to trap invasive species of hornets that kill bees – WGAU

The Georgia Department of Agriculture is stepping up its efforts to help get rid of the invasive yellowlegged wasp.

Yellow-legged hornets are a species of social wasp that build egg-shaped paper nests, often in trees. These nests can grow to be enormous, with an average of 6,000 workers.

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The hornet is native to tropical and subtropical areas of Southeast Asia and “is a predatory insect that has been reported to attack Western honeybee colonies and has become a serious pest to beekeeping operations where it has been introduced,” said Ben Powell, who directs Clemson Cooperative Extension’s Apiary and Pollinator Program.

Now, the state’s agriculture department is hiring part-time trappers to help track where the bee-eater hornets are moving, WTOC-TV reported.

“We’re working with our partners at USDA to show that we’ve not only searched in the area where we know it’s there, but we’ve also searched in other places out of an abundance of caution, just to show that it’s not there, and that’s important,” Mike Evans, program director for the Georgia Department of Agriculture’s Plant Protection Division, told the television station.

So far, the department has set more than 1,000 traps and said help monitoring those traps will make tracking and removing the hornets more efficient.

The job pays between $15 and $17 an hour, and the workweek can last up to 29 hours, the television station said.

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