Dr Eleanor Jones: 2023 Asian hornet outbreak. Plus Q&A with Dr Belinda Phillipson (DEFRA Bee Health Policy Lead) and Professor Nicola Spence (DEFRA Deputy Director for Bees)
The 2023 Asian hornet outbreak and the work Fera has been doing to support NBU Inspectors are described. The Inspectors have been destroying the Asian hornet nests as they find them and sending these, and lone hornet trap samples, to Fera for analysis. Fera dissects the nests to determine their size and life history, and genetically analyses a sample of the nest individuals and all the trap samples. This genetic analysis gives information on drone production and where the nest is in its lifecycle, whether nests have been formed by the same queen, and whether lone hornets are from the found nearby nests.
Dr Eleanor Jones is a molecular geneticist at Fera Science, working closely with the NBU lab. She started work at Fera Science in 2015 and rapidly became involved with Asian hornets, setting up the first genetic analysis of incursions in the UK with the first incident in Tetbury in 2016 through to the events in 2023. When not working on bee threats, she works on genetic detection and analysis across plant health, bee health, GM, and using DNA methods to monitor the environment. She is also employed at Newcastle University as a Senior Lecturer. Prior to her life at Fera, she obtained her PhD
at the University of York and worked at the University of Uppsala and as a consultant ecologist.
good afternoon ladies and gentlemen welcome to this afternoon’s presentation this talk by Dr Ellena Jones from ferah Sciences limited has been pre-recorded afterwards we will have Professor Nicholas Spence and Dr Belinda philipsson from def join us via Zoom to answer any questions you may have hello my name’s Dr Elena Jones and I work for Farah science limited thank you very much for the invitation to speak today and apologies for not being able to make it imp person I was going to talk today about the analysis on genetics that we’ve done for Asian Hornets we’ve been doing this analysis since 2016 but I was going to update primarily about what happened last year in 20123 so by way of background the Asian hornet es valtina is a hornet species that’s found across much of Southeast Asia from which it has expanded in an invasive way into South Korea in the early 2000s from when it’s jumped to Japan in 2012 and it’s also invaded Western Europe starting at around 2005 these Invasion events are thought to have started from fairly low numbers of Founders but even so you would consider them to be highly successful they spread extend ens L from their first point of introduction so if we look at the expansion into Europe in a bit more detail it was first found in 2005 and it has expanded rapidly since then into the Benelux region Germany it’s gone down into the Iberian Peninsula and also crossed into the Italian Peninsula as well this map is taken from an EU life project website and it hasn’t been updated particularly intensively as last updated in 2019 and the dark red shows places where it’s been found in 2018 and 2019 and then pal read its places where it was found previous to that and as we know we had the first finding in the UK in 2016 and so the presence is also noted on this map in the paler colors and then where the more recent findings were it’s in the darket C so the region of interest is the K Mainland and we had our first incursion our first arrival of an Asian hornet in 2016 and this photo just at the bottom is that first Hornet that was found recovered and sent to Farah for analysis and we nicknamed it Harriet she’s a female worker and I think she was from tetbury so every year since that first year there have been about one to three nests found annually and they’re shown as the orange squares on this map and they’re sort of found not quite at random they’re certainly found more to the south of the country than the North and we also have single Hornet findings so this these are just Hornets that have been found on their own sometimes they’re found next to things where they’ve probably been imported on for example camping equipment or bits of Machinery in brought in from abroad and sometimes it’s not entirely clear where they’ve come from and these seem to occur perhaps even more hazly across the UK so we know that these Hornets are arriving and we know that they can successfully breed for one year before we exterminate The Nest the pattern was very much broken in 2023 uh where instead of having one to two nests we found 72 nests at 56 locations these weren’t all laid by individual Queens we know that 40 of them were primary and secondary Nest pairs so 14 of those were the primary nest and then 14 were the secondary Nest that the same Queen had gone on to form but still it’s a remarkable uptick in the number of nests that we found the big map shows the full extent of where the nests were found and there’s quite a concentration down in the Southeast corner of Britain so what happens with the Asian hornet uh individuals and the Asian hornet nests that are found and destroyed so the efforts that go into reporting finding and destroying the nests are shared across a great number of people including members of the general public beekeepers apab Health Inspectors and the inspectors will find and destroy the nests and they will then package them up ideally refrigerated and they get couriered to Farah for analysis also any individual Hornet that’s been caught in a trap or has been caught as an incidental maybe hand netted or has been found by someone and reported those are also sent in tubes of ethanol to Farah and what do we do with them well the nests are dissected and then there genetic analysis is undertaken on a range of the individuals from the nest and on all the lone horns so when the samples arrive at Farah fer is a very large uh scientific site with many different teams but the team that coordinates everything is the nbu national Reference Laboratory and they coordinate the processing of the samples so they receip all of the samples in they dissect the nest and they take subsamples of individuals from the nests uh and they also receipt in the lone hornets and they’ll take a sample so a leg from The Lone hornets and they send the samples on to the molecular teams for genetic analysis but they’ll also send some of the samples over to entomology for further dissections to try and identify things about the Hornets and there’s just a photo of two Labs here I’ll just see if I have my pointer this is the mbu lab where the samples are recited in there’s a fume Hood At The Back which is used for dealing with any Nest that has been covered in pesticide safely so that it not doesn’t cause any harm to people and then this is one of the molecular Laboratories I’ve taken a photo through the window and it has a big banner that says plant Health quarantine facility because much of the work that we deliver is actually for plant Health as well as for bee health so with the morphological identification of the individuals what we want to do is we want to pick out the queens of the nest and we also want to pick out the females that have been laid and uh provisioned such that they’re going to turn into the next generation of Queens so the gin and within the national Reference Laboratory all of the adult male individuals are sexed so the males separate from the females just use my pointer but I think it’s very obvious so the females have the sting and the males don’t have the sting and then all of the females are subsequently weighed um and everything that’s above 0.6 grams is considered to be a potential gy or queen and this is a number taken from one of the papers out there so all the females we everything above 0.6 gram is considered to be a potential gine and is passed on to entomology the entomologists take further measurements on those suspect Gins one of them is the maximum mesoscutal width where they’re looking for a a threshold of 4.5 mm across the tegula across the adult head um and anything that’s above 4.5 is considered to be a potential gine and everything under that is more likely to be a worker this photo just illustrates the potential size differences you can be looking at that this is a queen from a nest and this is a worker from the same nest those ones that have already been identified as being potentially G on the based of weight are also dissected we haven’t the time to dissect everything uh they’re dissected by The entomologists Who are looking for the presence of fat bodies because any gy is going to have to overwinter so it needs she needs a certain amount of fat F to help her see through get through hibernation whereas the workers typically don’t carry fat or don’t carry much fat and they’re also dissecting to look for the presence of eggs and these eggs would be produced by the queen that’s the queen of that Nest so the one that’s out there laying all the eggs and this rather revolting picture here just illustrates that where you have the lots of little eggs and then you have the far larger eggs that presumably making their way through to be laid dissections uh undertaken by the national Reference Laboratory within Farah and they dissect the nests partly to get an idea of how large The Nest is so the size of the nest is recorded and characteristics like the number of combs is also recorded and they also take out the adults that they’re going to identify to being males and females and they take samples of each life stage uh within the nest so they take everything from the youngest which are the eggs through to the larvi the pupy the emerging adults and the adults and these go on for genetic analysis and this is just a photo to illustrate the diversity of the nests well some of the nests that we got in 2023 and you can see that some of the nests are quite small they’re perhaps the primary nests that were caught earlier in the season or maybe they’re nests that never really managed to get going but some of the nests are considerably larger for example this one here in the middle it’s pretty beefy the other thing you can notice is that a lot of them are associated with some sort of vegetation so they have branches or Twigs growing through them and this just indicates where the nests are frequently found embedded in shrubbery or in trees but one thing I did find interesting is there’s at least two which were found inside bird houses uh one of them in the concrete type birdhouse and then another down here which seems to absolutely be pushing against the sides of the bird house so the genetic methods back in 2016 we were first asked what genetic analysis we could do on the Hornets which would help some of the management efforts and so we took some micro satellite markers from the literature so in France they had already developed some micro satellite markers was this ARA etle paper from 2012 they developed these markers that are neutral they’re not associated with any particular Gene they’re not under any sort of selection and they’re distributed across the whole genome and there’s 15 of them and they’re micr satellites are known for being highly variable they’re not actually highly variable in these Asian Hornets because the population is so inbred and well has got so little genetic diversity but you can use these mic satellite markers all 50 of them to build up a genetic fingerprint for each of the Hornets that we genotype because we’ve been using the same markers since 2016 we’ve got an extensive database that allows us to compare between years in the UK and we are also um kindly provided with some samples by Florence Mel who worked on uh was a co-author on some of these French papers and that’s allowed us to compare our data directly to the French data so we mentioned previously that the nest we take samples across different life stages and this is just to illustrate that so here we have an egg I’m not sure if you can see there’s a red arrow pointing towards a small gray little egg at the bottom of the cell which I’m sure is actually very hard to sample without popping so we should be getting 10 eggs from each Nest we also get 10 of the lar these rather grub likee things here and 10 of the peup which I always think looks slight alien and then we get 10 of the teneral or emerging adults which are adults that have undergone pupation but have not yet escaped from their underneath the silk and caps and we also take 10 adult males and 10 10 adult females per Nest obviously we don’t always get all of these low stages but we try and get up to that theoretical maximum of 60 individuals per nest what do we do with this genetic data that we’re collecting one of the easiest things we can do is we can use the mic satellite genotypes to tell us whether um the individual we’re looking at has one copy of each chromosome or two copies of each chromosome and we can do this very simply if there’s only one variation over that mic satellite for that individual for all of those 15 it’s highly likely it’s it’s only got one copy of each chromosome but if we see any signs hetro zygosity which is two different variants of that micro satellite then we know that must be at least two copies of the chromosome present why is it important it’s important because the Asian Hornet like the honeybee is a hloy deployed system in which the individuals with one chromosome copy the haids are the males and the individuals with two chromosome copies the diploids are females that is both workers and gu and queens and the way it works is inside the female she makes eggs by a process which puts one copy of each of her chromosomes into the eggs if she chooses to fertilize the egg with sperm from the male that she mated with she passes on one copy of her chromosome it combines with a copy of the chromosome from the sperm and it forms deployed individuals both of which will these will develop into being females however if she takes um the egg and doesn’t fertilize it there’s just one copy of the chromosome inside each egg and that will develop it’s a hloy and the growing gamut will recognize it only has one copy of each chromosome and it will develop as a drone there is an a quirk in these hloy diploid systems where in areas with very low genetic diversity or instances where there’s a lot of inbreeding some of the f fertilized eggs think that they are hloy the mechanism that they’re using to determine whether they’ve got one copy of each chromosome or two copies of each chromosome is formed into believing they’ve just got a single copy and they develop develop into males called diploid males and this can be quite problematic in some of the populations which I’ll discuss uh in one of the coming slides we have uh used our genetic markers to identify the hloy individual and these are the individuals the queen has laid with the intention that they will become drones so we’ve taken the nest and it’s been destroyed at a particular point in time and we can count up how many haids we have and how many diploids we have at each life stage so in this example here four out of the 10 eggs are hloy six out of the 10 eggs are ly eight out of the 10 eggs are pey uh but only two out of the 10 teneral adults are haids uh and there are a few adult males I’m not sure if there are 10 or not one of them at least uh is a true drone a true hloy and the reason we’re interested in this is that if you think about the life cycle of the Asian Hornet so where you have uh the hibernating Queen emerges she forms a primary nest and builds up a supply of workers they go on and they build a secondary Nest the population builds up up the nest reaches a large size and at that point the queen switches from producing the workers which are going out to provision The Nest to make the nest larger into producing uh the drones into producing Suns that she wants to go out and produce the Next Generation after she’s produced the drones it’s thought she then goes on to produce the Gin so she’ll swap from produ She’s producing diploids here that going to be workers haids here which are going to be the drones and then she swaps back to producing diploids and these are going to grow up as the G and if we know what the nest is doing whereabouts the production of the haids are we get a very good idea about whether the nest has been destroyed in time so if you take this example here there are some adult drones already produced so that represents a certain risk of breeding but it seems less likely that the G have reached adulthood because it’s likely that they’re being produced at this point here so there’s a peak of production of these drones and then she’s swapping back to production of um diploids and it seems likely these if they reached adulthood would be the next generation of G the next generation of Queens but the nest has been destroyed at this point so none of these deployed individuals made it through to adulthood and that’s one of the main bits of information we get out of identifying haids and diploids it’s about standing when the nest was destroyed before it started breeding the other main use we make of the microsatellite data is we genotype every single lone Hornet that we’re s sent if we can so everything is sent in in ethanol sometimes they’re from traps and they and occasionally they’re so degraded they sort of smell pretty Rank and they’ve started decomposing occasionally we can’t get a genotype but we work very hard to try and get a genotype from every single Lan individual so if you think about the work that we’re doing we produce up to 60 genotypes from each Nest so we have a thorough understanding of the genotypes that are present in the nest we can infer what the Queen’s genotype was so what the mother genotype was and we can infer what the father or Father’s genotypes are we also have the Gen types of these individual Hornets that have been caught out of the wild and what we can do is we can say were those lone hornets from that Nest or were they from another nest and we can do this very reliably using the mother and father genotype and just asking the question can they be The Offspring of these mothers and fathers or can they be the full siblings or half siblings to the individuals from The Nest that we found and destroyed so that’s very handy the key bit of information we’re trying to get here really is we’re trying to identify if there are any individuals out there that don’t allocate back to a particular nest and the reason these ones are important is that if we get this information in time we can in feed that back to the inspectors on the ground and they can continue monitoring or they can extend monitoring efforts they can take some form of action to try and pick up on where these individuals have come from but also if it’s not possible to find the nest that these individuals have come from that’s an identifier that there’s potentially going to be further nests in subsequent years because if there is a local Nest nearby that these have come from and it’s remains undiscovered then potentially it will go on and breed and this analysis gives lots of relevant information so the results well if we take the results firstly from uh evidence that nests were destroyed um later on in the season and that they may have started breeding this is the mix of the morphological data which identifies the gin and the genetic data which identifies the true adult drones so these are the the males that have reached adulthood and are haids so they none of them are these Duff diploids males and the figure here we have the adult drones are just red spots locations where we found the adults drones and then um the map is not fine enough resolution so I’ve had to condense down the sites where we find found the Gin have got in theory the blue circle but it’s gin and drones it’s a filmed blue circle so these places here are ones where we found both gin and drones we found five nests where there were gin there was one quite far to the North and then some down in southeast England and we had nine nests which had true adult drones this is slightly what you would expect if the drones are being produced first we were expecting that we will find more nests that had uh the adult drones than we would find the Gin which are being produced later and in four of the nests we found both adult gin and adult drones and just as an observation uh when we found the G they were mostly outside the nest but when we found the drones they were mostly within the nest um was just an interesting observation moving on to the results from the lone Hornets with these loone Hornets we were trying to genetically allocate them back to a nest that had been destroyed or not and we genotyped a total of 1,664 Lone Hornets of which 1,627 we could allocate back to to one of the nests that had been destroyed and this left 37 Hornets that we couldn’t say which Nest they had come from and it seemed likely they were from a nest we hadn’t sampled four of them were Spring Court Queens so they were caught in the early spring months and they’re likely to have been mat females uh mat Queens who were flying around trying to establish a nest there was some monitoring nearer by these sites but it’s unlikely that there was an active Nest they had yet to form the nest themselves in 2023 three of the um three of the summer CAU ones were Singletons which is to say they were Hornets caught on their own far from other hornets and two of them were drones so they were the males out trying to find mates and it’s likely these had traveled some distance from their nests or they could potentially have been hit trikers it’s not very clear uh and one of them was a worker there was some monitoring around these sites but no other sightings whilst these definitely have come from an active Nest whereabouts that Nest was is quite diffuse we don’t really know where the nest was there were no other Hornets caught so they could be they could have been accidentally transported as hitch kikers or something but at six locations we had clusters of two to 14 Hornets so we were catching multiple individuals likely from the same nest that we had not managed to find and these were found at five locations in hent so again that Southeast cluster and one location at Plymouth where we found three adult individuals which was relatively strong indication that there was a nest somewhere that had yet to be discovered just combining those two bits of information into a single figure uh into a single slide we have both the unallocated hornets and um which indicate where there might be nests missing and we have the nests that have potentially produced the next generation of queens and drones these results are all given um to Def be health and to apa B Health to inform the management decisions they make about what to do this season say trapping and monitoring in many ways the results I’ve just presented are uh the bulk of the results that we’re interested in so the reason we undertake the genetic analysis and the reason why de pays for the genetic analysis is for the information that’s relevant to the management of the Asian Hornet it’s extremely fascinating to be working on Asian Hornet genetics but that in itself isn’t a sufficient reason to do it but 2023 had a large amount of data compared to previous years and we were able to also look into some of the other things that were happening in our data and one thing I was particularly interested to look at was whether what we think is true about the life cycle of the Asian hornet in its reproductive stage is actually true so what is thought happens is that the female will start to produce the haids through the drones and then she swaps to producing the gin and so I was interested to have a look in our data to see whether this was true or not so what we did was we um made a graph that showed whether nest had uh haids uh up here or no haids and this is a progression over time where zero is the first Nest we caught and then days since that first Nest was caught and the stat our statistician fitted a regression to this to show at what point the haids were being produced if you fitted it to a curve so if you look at the haids first there is fairly early on uh the haids being produced if you then plot the presence of true drones again saying nests with no true drones nests with true drones and these have being checked to make sure that none of them are deployed male males uh the fitted line occurs later on than that for the haids and you would expect this to be true because the haids are just true drones which haven’t necessarily reached adulthood yet and so they take a while to mature and then they turn into the true drones the M haids we can also plot on the presence of gin again it’s nests with no gin and then this is the nest with gin progression over time and you can see that the fitted line occurs later on in the season than it does for the true drones and so we do have this slight Step in Time which is supporting this idea it’s supporting the idea that you get the production of the drones first followed by the production of the Gin as you can see from the emergence of these curves and this is reassuring because if we were had found evidence that GS were actually being produced before the drones then it’s possible that some of the nests where we thought they were at a lower risk of breeding we’re actually quite high but that doesn’t seem to be the case so that’s reassuring one thing that comes out from that is the presence of these diploid drones the female Queen the queen is laying these Di de loyed eggs with the intention that they’re going to develop into workers and they don’t they develop into drones and they’re unlikely to performing to be performing the function of a of a worker they’re less likely to perhaps go out and forage they’re perhaps less able to defend the nest and they’re also going to be another mouth to feed within the nest so it’s likely that represent uh a drain on the resource of the nest and a fitness cost and they are present in quite a high proportion of the nests that we found so in 2023 we found them in about 1/3 28% of the nests which compares to the numbers from ARA atal in France um at around at 33% so again around a third so it’s consistent across the two places but it’s not only that um but we also found nests where we found the presence of triploids these are individuals with three copies of each chromosome they workers and they to be uh no different to diploid workers and they must have been produced when a female Queen mat with a diploid drone and that will give rise to these three chromosome copies but if those females in the nest were laid as G they when they went on to reproduce they wouldn’t be able to lay viable eggs so the cost of these drones is not only the cost of the first generation Nest that they’re in but also they carry a cost into the Next Generation if they manage to breed successfully I mean the indication is that they aren’t breeding successfully very often but even so that’s a sort of second generation cost it’s been suggested that the queen to get round this issue of the diploid drones a mechanism could be to to mate with many different drones so the genetic cause of diploid drones is low genetic diversity if the queen mates with a drone that has the same um sex determining Locus uh alel she has that’s when you get the production of the diploid drones at least that’s the hypothesis so the idea is that if the queen mates with multiple males she’s more likely to produce at least some individuals that are uh that are proper workers and fewer of these diploid drains um but we don’t see this in the UK data last year we had 91% of the nests were single mated 9% of them were double mat and there was no evidence at all of uh triplem individuals or uh higher numbers of matings than that and this is very similar to the results we found in previous years we’ve never yet really been confident that we found a tribl mat Nest we have had some double M ones but it seems like it’s predominantly single M now the numbers in ARA etel in the published paper are a lot higher they report a very high uh proportion of uh a higher number of multi matings um they use a piece of software called colony to estimate the number of multim matings that you need to account for the data in each nest and when we apply that same framework of analysis to our data it also comes up with higher numbers but if you look at the raw data at least when you have the single and the double uh mated Queens it’s very easy to see and easy to analyze that you actually only need need to have say one or two drones accounting for that so for that reason we don’t tend to use colony to to estimate the number of meetings that’s going on you if you had higher number of meetings so higher numbers of fathers contributing to the nest it’s not possible to manually determine the number of drones and you definitely need to use this uh program like colony to make that estimation if we reanalyze the ARA data using the same meth methods that we typically use then the multi mating rate does drop and in fact around 44% of their nests could be accounted for by single matings uh about 11% by double matings and then around 44% are triple mat or more than that females so it’s possible that in France in the area ARA at Al um studied there is a higher rate of multim mating than we find in the UK um but it’s hard to say which is typical for the Asian Hornet it would be interesting to see further data across the rest of Europe to see which one occurs more frequently the sort of low rate that’s found in the UK or the slightly higher rate that’s found in France uh back in 2015 so from our data we don’t see any sign of higher rates of multim mating to recompense for this another thing that comes out in our data that’s not related to the double matings is that we do see quite a large number of nests that have worker laid eggs in them about 133% of the nests had work worker laid eggs the workers lay the eggs they they haven’t mated therefore the eggs have to to develop as hloy um and drones but they’re genetically they’re quite easy to pick out provided we have enough data in the nest we haven’t done any further analyses to see whether there’s something about perhaps The Nest is smaller or it’s failing or it’s later in the season um to try and account for this but it’s certainly an interesting uh observation so to just pick up the strand of these diploid drones a little further so we know that diploid drones are present in about a third of the nests and they’re likely to be present when the label of inbreeding is high and there are some papers that talk about the potential for what’s called a diploid male Vortex it’s a sort of extension Vortex um which takes place if uh the population has too few sex determining Lo Loi you get too many diploid drones the diversity of the population decreases and it enters an Extinction spiral and it’s unable to breed any further so it’s possible that some of these very remote nests where they do seem to be Singletons in the landscape they might die out anyway because if the GU are forced to mate with their brother brothers because there are no other drones nearby they’re more likely to produce these deploy drones and the M Nest might simply not be viable and that it might explain why you seem to get um sort of jumps in the presence of the Asian hornet in Continental Europe and then they they seem to disappear and it’s only as The Invasion front gets closer and there are more Asian Hornets dispersing into the location that you get established population but you certainly wouldn’t want to take it as red you certainly want wouldn’t want to be bold and say well these will die out anyway they definitely need management effort and management effet is fully expended in making sure they do die out final thing that we Al that we check every year is to see whether the Hornets that we find in the UK are likely from the European population or whether it’s possible that we’re also looking at um recent arrivals from Southeast Asia and so far we found no evidence at all that we have got any Asian Hornets coming in from Asia rather than the European population so our current activities um partly is just Tiding up the Loose Ends from the previous season in terms of getting all our reports completely tidied away but also preparing for the next uh wave of Asian Hornets so we’re I think we’ve already received our first Spring Court female but we’re likely to get quite a few Spring Court females this year and one of the central questions we’ll be asking with those is are they The Offspring of any of the nests that we were we found and destroyed in 2023 so we’ve already highlighted places where we think the nests were destroyed too late so it’ll be interesting to see whether we find Spring Court females from those that we can tie back from those nests and that’s a very straightforward question to answer with the genetic markers we’ve got we’re very well able to identify things back to the nest that they came from we’re also getting prepared um for the large volume of samples we’re expecting to receive in summer and into Autumn and possibly even into early winter so the number of samples we got last year was huge compared to the number of samples that we got previously and so we’re just making sure that we we’re going to try and streamline everything make everything work more efficiently and hope to get the data back quicker for the genetic results we also have a PhD student who’s working on an entirely different track is working on a different set of genetic markers so we were funded by Def to uh do the home genomes of some 10 Asian Hornets and use those to see if we couldn’t develop better or different genetic markers in the project that we did we found genetic markers a low number and we they performed the same as the micro satellites we had had a plan to move across to those but thankfully we didn’t um because we’d have found it a struggle to deliver both in 2023 but we have a PhD student who is developing a panel of markers some sort of 400 or 500 markers across the whole um Genome of the Asian Hornets uh and the hope is that she’ll be able to look into questions like about ship uh in far greater detail and perhaps see if it’s possible to get some sort of res better resolution about where the Asian Hornets are coming from so thank you very much for listening to the talk um and I’d just like to acknowledge all of the people who contributed to the work so BP Keepers and members of the public for their vigilance and for their reporting without whom it would have been extremely difficult to find Asian Hornets um to Def for the funding and the National Bee unit particularly the bee Health Inspectors for going out and finding these samples and for returning all of the samples in good condition and in a timely way for Farah to be able to do the analysis on it the uh work took in a huge amount of fah staff this year because of the sheer volume of samples we were dealing with some 4,600 samples were genot toed so the national reference laboratory and particularly Victoria Tomy and Ben Jones and from entomology Rob Dei has been leading up much of the work on these Asian Hornets and we actually had to call across two molecular teams the R&D team and the high throughput uh delivery team and just a name check Sam mcgreg and joy K from those teams as well but we also had to use the land use team um for mapping uh and figuring out where everything was from uh and thank you very much for the bbka for giving me the opportunity to talk today unfortunately I can’t take your questions I have been sent four questions which I’ll try and give you a brief answer for now but I think you’ll be joined by some colleagues from defra after this session um who might be able to answer some of the questions or forward them on to me a common question is is there a resident UK population and from the genetic data we cannot confirm that there is and nor can we say that there’s not and there’s a variety of reasons for that one of them is that we don’t have good comparative data to compare what we might call the UK population um against so if we want to say there is a UK population and it is different from a population in northern France or it’s different from the population in Holland then we need to have good mic satellite data from those locations the papers out there the perhaps the most relevant one is the AR atal paper from uh 2015 um but that was a that was a that’s nine nests taken in 2015 or before from I think it was more central France that doesn’t represent a good reference data set for us to compare against and say it is different or it’s not different from the UK population so that that absence of a reference population is means that we can’t make that comparison very easily the other problem is that we’re using um 15 micro satellite markers in a highly low genetic diversity population and so we could look at questions like kinship of the Queens from nearby nests so if we took two nests and we said are the Queens from those nests fall siblings to each other that might help us say whether there was a nest that we had been breeding in the previous year but unfortunately with our current Mike satellite markers we can’t tell the difference between two random individuals that are not related to each other and two siblings if we’re only looking at those two individuals so unfortunately the data cannot tell us whether we have and also cannot tell us if we haven’t got a resident UK population could a single mated or inbred Queen suggest we have a small population in the UK which are breeding has the analysis been cross referenced with the results from France to confirm genetics so yes we do make reference to that French paper ARA etal from 2015 and we’ve also run samples from that so that we’ve got directly comparable data sets but their data set is quite small and it’s also from quite a while ago um so I discussed in the previous slide so it does appear that we have fewer matings compared to that AR atel paper but we can’t tell what the norm is is it that arael were picking up abnormally High rates of mating in the population that they were sampling and the UK is more typical of the inverted commer normal situation or is the UK the outlier so it’d be very nice to see comparative data sets from the rest of Europe to answer which one is perhaps the Oddity or whether it’s a bit of a Continuum and we’ve perhaps got a sample bias in one of the papers or one of the studies I don’t really see that anyone’s going to do that study but it would be very interesting if it did happen I don’t think that we would be able to use that information in as it stands the information what we’ve got from our current study and the araral paper to say that there is a meaningful difference and that one is suggestive as of a resident UK population um you suggest the Queens have different mothers suggesting we don’t have a population here has the gene analysis been compared with the results from France to confirm this inbred single mated Queens suggest that these could be from a small population in the UK but the second part of the question is very similar to the question above we can look at the genetic diversity index for the for the population we have which is a sort of inbreeding index and we could compare it to the ARA one but we are comparing to quite small data sets to each other and it’s not hard to know if that comparison will be meaningful the same with the single mating versus double mating versus multi mating rate again it’s hard to say that that’s a meaningful comparison that means something significantly different is occurring for the first part of the question you suggest the Queens have different mothers suggesting they don’t we don’t have a population here so in some locations for example in Maidstone we had multi many nests sort of five or six nests um in a single location and what we did was we asked the question whether the mothers of those nests um could all be full siblings to each other and when we’re comparing more than two individuals we begin to be able to say with greater confidence these cannot be full siblings and that was the case in many of the sites where we had lots of nests in close proximity they could not all have come from a single nest in 2022 they could have come from a nest uh in the UK in 2022 with genetic input from elsewhere so perhaps drones from outside or they could all be freshly imported individuals but the genetics can’t really inform on those different scenarios all we can say for sure is that the queens that formed the nest that we found in 2023 in that small geographic area didn’t come from just one nest in 2022 another group of questions that I get is uh can we use different methods would approaches like whole genome sequencing help study the Asian Hornets and the answer is possibly um home genome sequencing is Not Practical when we talk about the number of samples that we would propose to do for Asian Hornets taking into consideration how large The genome size is so it’d be extremely expensive to do it’ be problematic to store all that data and I’m not sure that we would actually be able to we have the analytical framework to assemble those genomes and then compare them to each other but as I’ve said before we have a PhD student who’s looking at genomic type approaches she’s looking at whole at Large Scale snip markers across the genome and it’s possible that those markers might be able to say something informative about whether if you took two queens you could say for sure that they’re full siblings or not and so it’s Poss possible that other approaches might be able to solve it and that the PhD students with Newcastle University might be able to give some answers uh I think I’d best end there to leave time for questions from the deer Representatives thank you very much thank you for that excellent and very interesting look at the genetics of Asian Hornets now we have Professor Nicholas Bens and Dr Linda Phillipson on Zoom with this how can we confidently say they haven’t come from Asia but we can confidently say they’ve come from France and because of the the genetics we know that they’re very closely related to the population that are derived on that are on the continent and that that’s quite strikingly different the the genetics that you’ve seen from the ones in Asia with the differences are bigger so why can’t we say confidently we whether we’ve got a population here or they’re coming in from France because they’re much close it’s really tricky but they’re much more closely related so um there’s a bigger distance if in just you think in terms of time when the first one arrived in France and then spread that one’s just spread and generated the population here and the differences between the ones that we see in France the ones we see in the UK are really really small so it’s really and and populations are normally done as a distinct population that’s split off of an initial one and then separated as population over a period of years so it’s an ongoing wave if you imagine that it’s spread across Continental Europe and now is we’ve got incursions coming into GB is it really valid to talk about an Extinction Vortex when France was started with one Queen but she was multimate any Queen that’s arrived here is also mulated no we don’t think we’ve got data that demonstrates that the queen has mated with any more than two the one that arrived in France was initially multim with five or six is my understanding do that help can we put any restrictions on Imports and movements to prevent further Ingress to hopefully produce an Extinction for T um Asian Hornet is a really good hitchhiker and that’s what the results from the initial risk assessment showed so even if we put a ban on Imports they could come in you imagine the number of people who go on camping trips in France they can hide in the arches of cars we found them in camping equipment it it’s it’s just impossible to prevent them coming in so Extinction Vortex is probably unlikely because we’ll just be having fresh Imports anyone else does it matter if they are double M single mated or triple mated if whatever mating they are they firm to decimate our insect population in in the long term the more genetic diversity have they have the better chance they have of spreading further and in a sense creating um more impact if if it’s in a biological sense it’s quite an interesting population because you you could argue that with just one queen that arrived in France in the first place it would end up in being a bit of a population dead end and it wouldn’t it wouldn’t survive but clearly that isn’t the case so it’s obviously very capable and survive and can spread and survive so I agree in the sense that we shouldn’t worry so much about the multi meting but it tells us a bit about the edge of the population and How likely it is to survive uh and it’s additional information that we can pick up when we destroy the nests and analyze them well was the one from France well M or poorly M compared to where where they come from uh that’s a good question and I don’t know I’d need to take that away well that be a good question for you to come back on if if there’s research on that indeed that I would need to take to Ellie and other experts do do you collaborate much with the universities um in Europe particularly where um Sandra Ross comes from uh we do but we also Le so there are researchers in the UK so Pete Kennedy and the the University of EXA that works closely with Sandra uh and um It’s a Small World in terms of biology and research so um we even if we don’t speak to them regularly certainly our UK researchers who we have good connections with do why is the government not promoting it as an environmental and economic issue rather than the be isue I don’t think we are promoting it as a beekeeper issue um it’s clear we we’ve said in all of our messaging that it not only has an impact on honeybees it will also have an impact on unmanaged and wild pollinators as part of the government’s environmental Improvement plan uh this is one of the high priority um reasons why we’re protecting pollinators generally from Asian Hornet um but obviously in this instance there is a specific um risk to honeybees but we know that the wild bee population is also at risk there’s a feeling that’s not coming across to the general public that’s tricky because some of the messaging is not within our control the the media in particular are very fond of honey bees as we all are and they are are like a social insect species so I think they think that that will raise people con people’s concerns much more highly if they think that honeybees are under pressure or under attack but I think it’s a good point for us to consider how we better communicate the risk to The Wider environment and The Wider pollinator community so thank you for that point and I think the economic indicators as well are at risk there’s quite a lot of factors there I’ll come back to Chloe but over there is the Asian Hornet on the national risk register uh it isn’t no but we have flagged it up in various risk places and there are local resilience forums which uh we’ve been flagging up the risk to there are quite specific criteria that you have to go through in order to get something on the national risk register will we be updating the national pollinator strategy that expires this year with more focus on the invasive species that threaten the native pollinators uh the national pollinator strategy is not something that sits um it’s not my own responsibility I do contribute to it but it’s not my own responsibility so I’m sure that we will be including that in the in the list of things that will be part of the new and updated strategy do we know anything about the diet as horn it the balance of it across the seasons as there’s been some DNA analysis there’s been a small amount of DNA analysis but it’s looked it’s not been huge so we know about some of the species that they like to eat but it’s I don’t think it’s been done across the season it will have just been done with um a snapshot in time of Asian Hornets that have been captured I think if no one else has got a question I’m gonna come to L hello Belinda um my question is we know that we have G over winter in in Kent as one has already been found in a potting shed um how many do we think um potentially um will over winter successfully um and go on to make primary nests this year um you mean how many primary nests we would expect to see this year yes from the from what was missed last year I think that’s incredibly difficult to say and I would really like to say that we wouldn’t expect to see any because because the national B unit and APA did an amazing job in destroying 72 nests last year I’d need to double check the analysis of the GU that was found in the potting shed to see whether they’ve managed to allocate her to any of the nests this year and I don’t that answer I’d need to look into and get back to you but I don’t think I don’t think you can definitively say that she was produced from one of the nests last from that was found or destroyed in GB last year so what are the chances that unest went totally off the radar and didn’t get discovered last year that has produced G I think that’s really hard to say um that it’s a diminishing law of returns so in terms of uh a nest produces a large amount of gin and then a smaller number of those are fertilized and then a smaller number of those over winter and then a smaller number of those go on to produce successful nests so it could be that there is the odd one or two Nest which has been produced in GB but has not been successful in making it fully through to develop Nest that then has gone on to produce more G that the CH it’s really difficult to estimate I mean that’s part of the reason why we’re doing early spring traing this year uh to satisfy ourselves that uh we don’t have any of those these populations that may have overwintered uh and you know to pick up any that have um one last question I spoke with aliser Christie in Jersey quite extensively over the last couple of years and his numbers seem to indicate that between 10 and 15% of G will over winter successfully can you tell me how many G have been found in nests that have coming to you guys that have been investigated uh well I think I don’t know I don’t have the total number of guids but I think um Ellie presented it in her slides so there was four five of the nests had G and do you know how many they had in them sorry I don’t I off the top of my head no but the lab will have that information were they in the hundreds no okay okay thank you very much any extra questions from anyone no I think that’s that’s it thanks Linda and Nicola for answering questions thank you okay thank you I hope the rest goes well byebye e e e