The yellow-legged hornet

Names, and why there are several

The animal is Vespa velutina, and in Europe the subspecies involved is Vespa velutina nigrithorax. In Britain it was called the Asian hornet for years and official usage has moved to yellow-legged hornet, which is the name Defra, the National Bee Unit and the non-native species programme now use. The change was deliberate: 'Asian hornet' is ambiguous — several hornets are Asian — and it invited confusion with a much larger and quite different species.

What it looks like

A worker is roughly 20 to 25 mm long — a large wasp rather than a giant, and lighter-built than the native European hornet even where the two overlap in length. The identification is easier than most insect identification because two features are visible without a net and neither belongs to anything native.

• The legs are yellow at the ends, obviously so in flight. This is the feature the current common name is built on and the quickest single check.
• The body is very dark — an almost entirely black or dark brown thorax and a dark abdomen with one broad orange-yellow band near the rear. Overall impression is a dark hornet, not a stripy one.
• The face is orange when seen from the front.
• It flies with a hovering, hanging quality when hunting, which is unlike the direct flight of a wasp.

Where it came from and how it spread

Its native range is in Asia — southern China, northern India, and parts of southeast Asia. It reached Europe by accident, and the genetic evidence is unusually clear about how: the entire European population traces to a single introduction into south-west France, thought to have arrived in imported goods and first recorded there in 2004. One introduction, and probably one mated queen, is the origin of everything that has followed.

From there it spread outward at a rate of tens of kilometres a year under its own power, faster where human transport carried queens or nests. It has since reached Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the Channel Islands and beyond. The low genetic diversity of the invasive population — the signature of that single founding event — is what allowed the provenance of later incursions elsewhere in Europe to be traced back to it.

What it does to honey bees

Adult hornets feed largely on sugars, but their larvae need protein, and the workers hunt insects to supply it. Honey bees are an attractive prey source for a straightforward reason: a hive is a dense, predictable, permanently stocked concentration of insects in one place, which nothing in a natural landscape matches.

• Hornets hover in front of a hive entrance and take returning foragers in flight — behaviour usually called hawking. It is conspicuous and beekeepers recognise it quickly.
• Prey is carried away, the wings and abdomen discarded, and the thorax taken back to the nest as a protein pellet for the brood.
• Sustained pressure at the entrance changes colony behaviour before it changes colony numbers: foragers become reluctant to fly, which reduces the food coming in. This foraging paralysis can weaken a colony well before predation alone would.
• A weakened colony may be entered and its brood and stores robbed, which is the point at which losses become obvious.

Honey bees are not the only prey. The diet includes a broad range of insects — other social wasps, flies, including hoverflies, and other pollinators — so the concern is not confined to beekeeping. How much this matters for wild pollinator populations at landscape scale is an open question rather than a settled one, and it is being studied where the hornet has been present longest.

The position in the United Kingdom, as at August 2026

This section is dated deliberately and should be read as a snapshot. The first British record was in 2016. For most of the years that followed, individual finds were traced, nests were destroyed, and the working assumption was that each incursion arrived from the continent rather than from a population living here.

That assumption no longer holds unqualified. Genetic work on spring 2025 hornets identified four queens as likely offspring of nests destroyed in England in 2024 — direct evidence of successful overwintering rather than fresh arrival. Kinship analyses across nests found in England between 2016 and 2024 indicate a limited established population. The 2025 season recorded 163 nests and 544 credible sightings.

The official response has changed with the evidence rather than ended. In December 2025 Defra confirmed that the National Bee Unit would not carry out spring trapping in England in 2026, a decision taken because of the number and geographic spread of late-season nest finds in 2025, and asked the unit instead to concentrate on finding and destroying nests later in the season. Reporting, surveillance and nest destruction all continue.

Reporting a sighting

Reporting is the single most useful thing a member of the public can do about this species, and it is genuinely useful — the surveillance programme depends on public records, and a photograph attached to a report is what allows a sighting to be confirmed rather than discarded.

• In Great Britain and Northern Ireland, report through the Asian Hornet Watch app or the National Bee Unit's online notification form. A photograph, a location and a date are what make a report actionable.
• Photograph from a safe distance. A poor photograph of a real hornet is worth more than a good look with nothing to show for it.
• Report a suspected nest rather than approaching it, and never attempt to treat or remove one.
• Elsewhere, the equivalent national plant or bee health authority runs the scheme. Reporting routes are national and change, so check the current mechanism for where you are rather than following a link from anywhere else.

How dangerous it is, in proportion

To a person going about their day, not very. It is a defensive animal rather than an aggressive one and does not seek people out; the sting is painful and comparable to other large stinging insects. The serious risks are the ones that apply to wasp and bee stings generally: a person who is allergic to hymenoptera venom, and anybody who receives many stings at once — which in practice means somebody who has disturbed a nest.

The proportionate concern is agricultural and ecological rather than personal. This is a predator of managed honey bees and of other insects, and that is where its impact is measured. Coverage that leads on danger to humans is describing a different species, or is describing this one badly.