Experts issue warning over concerning spread of rare hornet species: 'Highly aggressive'
According to The Northern Echo, residents of County Durham have spotted the yellow-legged Asian hornet in the area, the first time the insect has been seen in the region this year. Only one yellow-legged hornet had been seen in Durham previously, when one was spotted in Northumberland in 2023.
The person who spotted the hornet was not able to catch it, leading to fears that it could nest in the U.K.
The yellow-legged Asian hornet is a "highly aggressive" invasive species of hornet that has been spreading like wildfire across parts of France since 2004 when they were first found there. Currently, there are over 500,000 nests in France.
Native to Southeast Asia, the yellow-legged hornet poses a serious threat to many pollinators in the U.K., particularly honeybees. While they aren't any more dangerous as individuals than your standard issue wasps or hornets, their nests can house thousands of wasps, and they become incredibly aggressive when those nests are disturbed. Attacks have led to injuries and deaths in Europe, according to The Northern Echo.
When non-native, invasive insects like the yellow-legged hornet are introduced to a new ecosystem, like the one in the U.K., they pose a serious threat to the insects that are native to that ecosystem because they have no built-in defenses. In this case, the hornets' aggressiveness poses a threat to pollinators that have no way to defend themselves, and letting them spread uncontained could see swathes of pollinators wiped out. This, in turn, could have a dramatic effect on the plants that rely on these insects for pollination.
The U.K.'s National Bee Unit has deployed hornet traps in Durham and the surrounding areas, and local yellow-legged Asian hornet teams have their eyes peeled for more of them or evidence of potential nests.
Authorities encouraged locals to keep their eyes open as well but to approach any situation involving the hornets with caution.
"Please take care and remain calm when photographing hornets," the National Bee Unit advised. "Do not disturb or provoke a nest under any circumstances."
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Atlantic
6 hours ago
- Atlantic
Washington's Quiet Work
In August 1775, nothing particularly dramatic was happening among the roughly 14,000 soldiers of the Continental Army besieging the British army in Boston. Indeed, nothing particularly dramatic happened for the next six months. And then, in March 1776, the British suddenly evacuated Boston. Which is why the months of apparent calm deserve a close look. The semiquincentennial of American independence has begun: The anniversaries of the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill are behind us; the reenactment of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys' storming Fort Ticonderoga was a smashing success. Other big moments await, culminating, no doubt, in a big party on July 4, 2026. One hopes and expects that there will be plenty of hoopla, because that is the American way. But 250 years ago today, the real and unspectacular work of American independence was under way. The Continental Army, created in June of 1775, had warily welcomed its new leader, George Washington, without much fuss. A slaveholding Virginia gentleman and loosely religious Anglican was going to lead an army that was mainly made up of New Englanders—including both psalm-singing, Bible-quoting descendants of the Puritans and dissenting freethinkers. For his part, Washington was appalled at what he saw: militia units that elected their own officers and called them by their first names, free Black men carrying weapons, money-grubbing Yankees (as opposed to land-grubbing Virginia gentry), and general squalor. 'They are an exceeding dirty and nasty people,' he told his cousin Lund Washington. Lindsay Chervinsky: The 'dirty and nasty people' who became Americans What happened that summer outside Boston was of monumental importance. If this was to be an American army and not just an assembly of colonial militias, then Washington would have to be the first American general, and not just a provincial. He would have to create a system out of chaos, and hold together a force against a dangerous enemy. Although slightly outnumbered and bottled up in Boston, which connected to the mainland by only the narrowest of peninsulas, the British army was tough, cohesive, professional, and eager to avenge its unexpected defeats and Pyrrhic victories. Washington did the work in many ways—by organizing the army in divisions and brigades, inspecting the troops, regularizing discipline, hammering home the importance of digging latrines, and quarantining soldiers who had smallpox. It helped that he looked the part of a military leader: tall, well turned out, graceful, and the best horseman in the colonies, by most accounts. No less important, he was able to transcend his aversion to those strange New Englanders. Two men utterly unlike his social set in Virginia quickly became his most trusted subordinates: Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, a Quaker with a talent for organization, and a tubby Boston bookstore owner, Henry Knox, who became the chief of artillery. The former was eventually made quartermaster of the army and then commander of the southern army, where he displayed a flair for field command. The latter brought 59 heavy-artillery pieces from Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga to the army outside of Boston in the dead of winter, before developing the artillery arm into the equal of its British opponent. Washington quickly realized that his most talented military leader was a third New Englander, the Connecticut merchant Benedict Arnold, who, until he committed treason, was the best field commander on either side of the conflict. In the autumn of 1775, Washington sent him off on a daring march through the Maine wilderness that very nearly wrested Quebec from British control. The commander in chief needed a headquarters guard—what we today call a personal security detail—and so in March 1776, the army created a unit known as the life guard. Washington selected men from each army unit, which meant that the life guard's personnel skewed in favor of New Englanders; as its first commander, he chose a Massachusetts man, Caleb Gibbs, who lasted until 1780. He chose southerners, too, for crucial positions, and not all of them gentlemen—Daniel Morgan of Virginia, for example, was a roughneck leader of riflemen who formed an elite corps. The point was clear: This was an American army, and talented men, no matter their background, could win their leader's trust and rise up the ranks. Washington remains in some ways the most remote of America's national heroes; he is more distant from us than Abraham Lincoln because of his greater austerity and reserve. He mastered his volcanic temper; prudently handled both his subordinates and his superiors; and knew the value of dignity and a certain distance in exercising command. He was brave but not particularly gifted as a tactical leader, and he was prone to devising overly aggressive and complicated plans, but these did not matter as much as the larger leadership qualities that he had brought with him to Boston. Small wonder that many years later, men who were his intellectual superiors—Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams—worked for him. His story shows why character and good judgment are far more important in a leader than mere intelligence. Despite wonderful writing about Washington in recent books, including Ron Chernow's 2010 biography and the first two volumes of Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the history of the Revolution, Americans do not value him as we once did. The fault lies across the political spectrum. For some (think of the 1619 Project), the fundamental sin of slavery overwhelms every aspect of biography. Washington controlled several hundred enslaved people on his Mount Vernon estate; he often treated them badly, and as of 1775, he felt no shame about that. Being a plantation owner was part of his identity, but not all of it, and more important: Like some of the other Founders, he became uneasy about reconciling the ideals of the Revolution with the practice of holding men and women as chattel—which is why he manumitted all of his slaves in his will. At a deeper level, this view of American history cannot help but crush patriotic pride in what remains, in retrospect, an astounding achievement. The Revolution culminated not in despotism but in a new political order based on liberty and self-government, built on ideals that, described with exceptional eloquence by another slaveholder, Jefferson, eventually blew up the evil institution on which their way of life rested. George Packer: A view of American history that leads to one conclusion A different form of relentless present-mindedness afflicts the current administration, which seeks to purge national parks and museums of references to the darker sides of American history, beginning with slavery but also including the slaughter and dispossession of American Indians, and various forms of discrimination and persecution thereafter. In everything from signage to artwork, the Trump administration reaches for pabulum and kitsch, a false and unidimensional depiction of the American past. As for academic historians, although some exemplary ones are at work—including Gordon Wood and David Hackett Fischer—the contemporary trend is to shun great individuals in favor of subaltern history. There is not much place for a commanding general in a pantheon composed of people overlooked by previous generations. That summer and fall in Cambridge and the other towns surrounding Boston, George Washington's work made a difference. It reminds us that American independence was won by dramatic deeds, to be sure, but also by mastering—slowly and painfully—the undramatic things, such as insisting on rank insignia and saluting, managing gunpowder production, and digging latrines properly. It reminds us that there is such a thing as individual greatness, and that it can make all the difference. And particularly in an age of self-righteous scorn, we would do well to recall how Washington's lifelong struggles with himself—his prejudices, his emotions, his upbringing and background—contributed to final victory. We can still profit by the example.
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
A bid to undo a colonial-era wrong touches a people's old wounds
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The Naga delegation to the museum opened its June visit with an Indigenous chant that alludes to the original parting of the Naga ancestors from their creator. The chant concludes with the hope that the ancestor will be reunited with the creator and help to heal the wounds of the past. 'I don't know if the process of repatriation will do the healing for us,' Kikon said. 'But I do know there's a lot of trauma and we need the healing.' This article originally appeared in
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
Sneaking into the Spy Museum's new vault
As with most museums, a vast majority of those objects are not on display. And until a few weeks ago, they were far away, stored at a location outside the capital -- making it a challenge for museum historians to reach the objects for study and preservation. Advertisement In 2020, the museum began consolidating its collection in its new building, a project that it completed this year. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Many of the artifacts in the vault came from one man: H. Keith Melton, a founding board member of the museum, who became one of the world's renowned spy collectors. He is not a former intelligence agent himself; rather, he made his money as one of the country's largest McDonald's franchise owners. A condition of his donation, which he first pledged in 2016, was that the collection would eventually be moved to the museum itself, Melton said. 'To properly care for, maintain, catalog, access the artifacts, they needed to be on the premises,' Melton said in an interview. 'You can't deal with it remotely. Artifacts need care and feeding and vigilance, and they need to make sure they're not deteriorating ." Advertisement The collections team at the International Spy Museum recently opened the doors to its den of secrets, offering a reporter and photographer a look at tools of the trade that, like much of spycraft itself, are kept out of public view. There are roughly 4,000 books in the vault, most of them donated by Melton. The most treasured of these is a World War II-era briefing book created by MI9, a wartime branch of British intelligence, to get Americans up to speed on its top secret espionage innovations. It includes designs for cameras disguised as cigarette lighters, coat buttons and gold teeth concealing compasses, and maps printed on clothing. Laura Hicken, the museum's collections manager, estimated that there were fewer than 20 copies of this book in the world. Among the museum's newest acquisitions are original courtroom sketches by William Sharp, an illustrator who died in 1961. One is of Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy who operated undercover in the United States for almost a decade and who was portrayed by Mark Rylance in the 2015 Steven Spielberg thriller 'Bridge of Spies.' In the drawings, Sharp portrayed Abel as looking stressed. 'For us, where so much of our history is told through gadgets and weapons and concealment devices, this is so incredibly personal and such an intimate look into the consequences of the things we cover,' Hicken said, referring to the sketch. (The museum, which is recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's largest espionage museum, has come under criticism in the past for sanitizing the unethical behavior of spy agencies.) 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'The purse actually conceals a camera. The pen conceals a microdot viewer. The shoe has a knife in it.' This article originally appeared in
