We live in dark times. Storm clouds gather over our nations, politics and planet. Let rip the end of days. We’re entering an era of suffering, tyranny and predatory, invasive wasps. So vote baddie. Vote end times. Vote for the Asian or yellow-legged hornet.
Like Trump, Putin, Netanyahu and Lee Anderson, this mortal creature is both terrifying and weird in its implausible lust for power and domination.
Native to south-east Asia, the yellow-legged hornet’s European conquest began in 2004 when a single mated queen stowed away in a container-load of pottery that arrived in the port of Bordeaux from China. Incredibly, it is believed that the entire rapidly spreading European population of yellow-legged hornets is derived from this one individual.
This hornet is actually smaller than our native ginger-hued hornet, and rather neat-looking with its yellow stripes and black trim. But it has a voracious appetite for native bees and wasps, and honeybees, and its colonies rapidly expand in summertime when it builds nests the size of a large watermelon, often high in trees.
Collectively, these colonies have a huge impact on flying insect populations. The hornets will hover outside beehives and jump on their prey, not just taking numerous bees but also creating a landscape of fear that sometimes paralyses a honeybee colony, preventing worker bees from foraging for food. French researchers estimate a single nest can consume 11.3kg of wild insects over its late summer lifetime.
The hornet has rapidly spread through western Europe. In Portugal, beekeepers say honey production in the north and centre of the country has fallen by more than 35% because of the hornets. Hives that used to produce 12kg of honey each year now produce 4-5kg.
The first yellow-legged hornet sighting in Britain was in 2016. The species is not thought capable of crossing the Channel under its own steam but hitches a ride on ships. British winters would once have been too cold for it, but global heating is changing that.
In 2020, 2021 and 2022 there were only two or fewer confirmed sightings of the hornet on mainland Britain. But last year they properly invaded. The government recorded 78 sightings, mostly of entire nests – burgeoning colonies – which were destroyed.
That is the tip of the coming iceberg. The island of Jersey has made a heroic attempt to eradicate the species (which flies there easily from the French mainland) but underwhelming British efforts will not keep this predator at bay.
So vote yellow-legged or Asian hornet – the perfect invertebrate symbol of our times: aggressive, destructive, and given a whole new lease of life by us, careless colluders in the capitalist-democratic implosion that imperils the whole planet.
Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition. Every day between 2 April and 12 April we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here. And at midnight on Friday 12 April, voting will open to decide which is our favourite invertebrate – for now – with the winner to be announced on Monday 15 April.
