Asian Giant Hornet - Predation

Predation

The Asian giant hornet is intensely predatory; it hunts medium- to large-sized insects, such as bees, other hornet species, and mantises.

The hornets often attack hives to obtain the honey bee larvae as food for their own larvae. A single scout, sometimes two or three, will cautiously approach the hive, producing pheromones to lead its nest-mates to the hive. The hornets can devastate a colony of honey bees: a single hornet can kill as many as 40 honey bees per minute thanks to its large mandibles which can quickly strike and decapitate a bee. The honeybee stings are ineffective because the hornets are five times the size and too heavily armoured. It takes only relatively few of these hornets (under 50) a few hours to exterminate a colony of tens of thousands of bees. After butchering the bees with impunity, the hornets loot the honey and carry off the bee larvae as food for their own larvae. The hornets can fly up to 100 kilometres (62 mi) in a single day, at speeds of up to 40 km/h (25 mph)

Adult hornets cannot digest solid protein, so the hornets do not eat their prey, but chew them into a paste that they feed to their larvae. The larvae in turn produce a clear liquid, vespa amino acid mixture, which they secrete to feed the adults on demand; larvae of social vespids generally produce these secretions, though the exact amino acid composition varies considerably from species to species. The feeding of adult wasps by larvae occurs generally in predatory social wasps, and not restricted to the genus Vespa.