The National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) has confirmed that it has found a new nest of Asian hornets in Cobh, Co Cork.
This follows the removal yesterday of the first ever Asian Hornet nest in Ireland from the back garden of a house in the Ballintemple area of Cork city.
Concerns about the possibility of a second nest in the region were sparked when a single hornet was seen and captured in a domestic house in Cobh earlier this week.
That deceased insect was subsequently retrieved by NPWS rangers who confirmed it was an Asian hornet.
The Ballintemple nest had been embedded high up in a sycamore tree and was very difficult to see from ground level.
There is a 10km flight distance between Cobh and Ballintemple.
This is five times the normal foraging range for Asian Hornets and that instantly fed fears among the experts about a second nest in Cobh.
Those fears were heightened when a second Asian hornet sighting was confirmed in the Cork harbour town.
Teams co-ordinated by the NPWS have been in Cobh over the past few days setting out food stations to attract the insects so they could monitor and track their movements.
The search for the exact location of this second nest was made far easier and significantly faster than in Ballintemple by the availability, for the first time, of tiny electronic tracking devices.
These little transmitters, which cost in the region of €120 each, are attached to the back of an insect to reveal the location of the nest.
The search in Ballintemple involved a far slower old fashioned triangulation tracking technique.
This required dabbing paint spots on the backs of the insects so the distances they travelled could be estimated.
Consequently, while it took over two weeks for the trackers to find the exact location of the nest site at Ballintemple, it took them only about two days to locate the nest site in Cobh.
In the coming days the NPWS will use the same protocols and practices perfected during yesterday's nest removal in the city to remove the nest in Cobh.
NPWS are expanding the methods available to Ireland to keep this invasive species at bay.
Experienced scientists used the knowledge gained from Cork and the landscape of Cobh to follow hornets as they flew clear flight lines over head.
The hornets were heading in a north/south direction back to their nest.
Through the scientist's spotting skills, the Cobh nest was identified high in a tree.
It is important that the new nest is neutralised quickly before any young queen hornets depart.
If they get out, they will spend winter outside the nest before starting new colonies of their own in the spring.
Asian hornets are an invasive apex insect predator that feed on pollinators and particularly like to eat honeybees.
Irish honeybees have no experience of such a predator and so are very exposed.
It is estimated that a single Asian Hornet nest would consume about 11kg of pollinator insects in a single season.
Separately, the National Biodiversity Centre confirmed the sighting of an Asian hornet at Inchicore in Dublin 8.
In that case the creature, which was identified as a sterile female Asian hornet, was photographed on 22 July but not reported to the NPWS until some date in August.
There have been no reports of any other Asian hornets in the Dublin region since then.
Experts in the field believe this Dublin hornet, which could not reproduce, was a solitary insect that most likely came to Ireland trapped on a container ship or in something like a pallet of fruit.
They do not believe the Asian hornet spotted in Inchicore came from a nest in the region.
Speaking before the existence of the second Asian Hornet site was confirmed, Dr Aidan O’Hanlon, an entomologist at the National Museum of Ireland said it would be really important to get samples of Asian hornets from any new nest so they can be analysed and compared, to see if they originated from the same gene pool.
Director of EU and International Affairs at the NPWS Áinle Ní Bhriain is appealing to members of the public to please not try to catch Asian Hornets with homemade traps.
"Give us the evidence. If you set out traps you are going to kill bees, wasps, hoverflies, butterflies, anything. The very animal we want to protect is also threatened by these traps", she said,
"If you see a hornet, take a photograph, send it on to invasives.ie and we will investigate it straight away," Ms Ní Bhriain added.
