Northern Giant Hornet (Vespa mandarinia): Murder Hornet Facts

What does a northern giant hornet look like?

The northern giant hornet looks like an oversized hornet built for power. Its head is large, broad and orange-yellow, with dark brown to black compound eyes and three small simple eyes on top. The cheeks behind the eyes are unusually wide, which gives the head a heavy, boxy shape and leaves room for the strong jaw muscles. The jaws themselves are orange, each with a black tooth used for biting and digging.

The thorax is dark brown to black, and the two pairs of wings are smoky gray-brown. The abdomen has alternating bands of dark brown or black and yellow-orange, and the sixth segment at the tip is yellow. The front legs are brighter than the middle and hind legs.

Coloring varies across the huge range, and older books divided the species into subspecies such as japonica, magnifica and nobilis. A 2020 revision of the genus dropped all subspecies, so these names now describe informal color forms. The species’ closest relative is the slightly smaller southern giant hornet (Vespa soror) of southern China and Southeast Asia, and fossils show the species has existed since the Miocene epoch.

As in all hornets, only females (queens and workers) have a stinger, which is a modified egg-laying tube. Males are harmless and have 13 antenna segments instead of 12.

How big is the northern giant hornet?

The northern giant hornet is the largest member of its genus, which contains about 22 species of true hornets.

The wingspan reaches about 76 mm (3 in), and a female’s stinger is about 6 mm (0.25 in) long. Older Japanese measurements give a weight of roughly 1–1.5 g (0.04–0.05 oz) for workers and males and about 2–3 g (0.07–0.1 oz) for queens, so a single worker can weigh ten times as much as a honey bee. A giant hornet worker is often as long as a queen European hornet. For comparisons with other wasps and look-alikes, see How big are murder hornets?

Where do northern giant hornets live?

The species is native to a broad arc of Asia. In the north it lives in the Russian Far East, Korea, northeastern China and Japan, where it is found from Hokkaido to the southern islands. Its range continues through central and southern China and Taiwan to Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar, and west along the Himalayan foothills of Nepal, Bhutan, northern India and northern Pakistan. It is best known and best studied in Japan, where it is common in the countryside.

The northern giant hornet is mainly a forest insect. It prefers low mountains, foothills and lowland forests, and it largely avoids open plains and high altitudes. In towns it needs parks and other green space and is absent from heavily built-up areas.

Unlike most hornets, it nests almost entirely underground. Queens choose narrow cavities, often old rodent burrows or spaces around rotting pine roots, at depths of about 6–60 cm (2–24 in). Nests in tree hollows or buildings are uncommon.

What do northern giant hornets eat?

Adults and larvae eat different food. Adult hornets cannot digest solid protein, so they drink tree sap, especially from oaks, along with juice from soft, ripe fruit. They also take a sugary, amino-acid-rich liquid that the larvae produce when fed. At sap flows the giant hornet is the dominant insect and usually drives away other hornets, butterflies and smaller beetles, although large rhinoceros beetles and stag beetles can hold their ground.

The larvae are fed protein. Workers hunt medium to large insects, including beetles, hornworms and other caterpillars, mantises, bees and other wasps. They kill prey with their jaws, cut off the most nutritious parts, mainly the flight muscles, chew them into a paste and carry it home. Because many of these insects damage crops, the hornet is sometimes regarded as useful to farmers in Asia.

How giant hornets raid honey bee hives

Late in the season, when a colony is raising hundreds of new queens and males, northern giant hornets switch to group attacks on the nests of other social insects. Targets include honey bee colonies and the nests of other hornets and yellowjackets. In some years such raids can wipe out more than half of the colonies of some smaller hornets and yellowjackets in an area.

A raid has three phases. In the hunting phase, single workers hover at a hive entrance and pick off bees one at a time. If a hornet finds a rich colony, it marks the site with a scent from a gland on its abdomen, and the northern giant hornet is the only social wasp known to mark food sources this way. Nestmates then arrive for the slaughter phase, in which a few to about 50 hornets kill the defending bees. Finally, in the occupation phase, the hornets take over the hive, guard it by clicking their jaws, and spend days carrying away larvae and pupae.

Western honey bees, brought to Asia by beekeepers, have no effective defense. According to Animal Diversity Web, an attack by 20–30 giant hornets usually kills 5,000–25,000 western honey bees within one to six hours. Japanese honey bees, which evolved alongside the hornet, fight back by smothering scouts in a ball of bees that overheats them, a story told in How do honey bees fight giant hornets?

Nests and colony life cycle

Mated queens hibernate alone through winter and wake in early to mid-April. At oak sap flows they feed in strict order of rank, with lower-ranking queens waiting their turn. From late April each queen searches for an underground cavity, builds the first small comb and raises the first brood of about 40 workers by herself.

Once the workers take over foraging, usually by midsummer, the queen stays inside and only lays eggs. By early August a typical nest has about three combs with around 500 cells and roughly 100 workers. A mature nest usually has four to seven horizontal combs linked by pillars, and the largest recorded combs measured about 50 cm (20 in) across with nearly 1,200 cells. Unlike the papery nests of many wasps, the giant hornet’s nest usually lacks a full outer envelope, since the soil protects it.

New males appear from mid-September and new queens from mid-October. Mating happens near the nest: males wait at the entrance, seize emerging queens in mid-air and mate with them on the ground for 8–45 seconds. The mated queens leave to hibernate in damp underground spots, while the old queen, the workers and the males die by late autumn. The nest is never reused.

How dangerous is the sting?

The sting is extremely painful because the hornet injects a large amount of venom through a stinger about 6 mm (0.25 in) long. The venom contains mastoparan, a peptide that damages cells, and a neurotoxin called mandaratoxin. Gram for gram it is not the most toxic wasp venom, and its danger comes mainly from the large dose and from multiple stings when a nest is disturbed. Giant hornets are also reported to spray venom toward the eyes.

Away from its nest, a giant hornet hunting or feeding at sap usually ignores people. Near the nest, especially in autumn, guards warn intruders by clicking their jaws and may then attack in numbers. Japan’s health ministry recorded an average of about 17 deaths a year from stings by hornets, wasps and bees combined between 2008 and 2018, down from about 30 a year in the 1980s and 1990s, and most such deaths are caused by allergic reactions. Giant hornets cause only part of that total.

The best protection is to keep well away from nests and to leave an area calmly if hornets start clicking or circling. Anyone who has trouble breathing, swelling of the face or throat, or many stings should seek emergency medical help immediately by calling 911 in the US, 112 in the EU or 999 in the UK.

The “murder hornet” in North America

The nickname “murder hornet” comes from Japanese media, which had used a similar phrase since at least 2008. It spread worldwide in 2020 after the species turned up in North America. In 2022 the Entomological Society of America adopted the name northern giant hornet instead.

The first North American nest was found and destroyed on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in 2019, and the first US records came from near Blaine, Washington, in late 2019. Officials later destroyed four nests in Whatcom County, Washington: one in October 2020 and three in August and September 2021. Genetic tests showed that at least two separate introductions had occurred, one from Japan and one from South Korea. After three years without a confirmed detection, Washington and federal officials declared the hornet eradicated from the US in December 2024. The full story is in Are murder hornets in the US?

Predators, people and conservation status

Adult northern giant hornets have few predators. Rival colonies of the same species raid each other, the crested honey buzzard, a bird of prey that specializes in wasp nests, digs out colonies, and large mantises occasionally catch a hornet. About 4% of females are parasitized by Xenos moutoni, a strange twisted-wing insect that leaves its host unable to reproduce.

People have a mixed relationship with the hornet. Beekeepers in Asia see it as a serious enemy of hives. In some rural parts of Japan, such as areas of Kumamoto and Miyazaki prefectures, the larvae and pupae are eaten as a delicacy, and a supplement drink was developed from the amino acid mix in larval saliva.

The species is common across much of its range, and no Japanese prefecture lists it as threatened. It has not been assessed for the IUCN Red List, so its global status is Not Evaluated.

Myths and facts

Myth: murder hornets hunt people. Northern giant hornets hunt insects. They sting people only to defend a nest or when trapped or handled.

Myth: every huge wasp in North America is a murder hornet. After the 2020 news reports, insect identification centers in the eastern United States received thousands of photos and specimens, and none was a northern giant hornet. Most were European hornets, eastern cicada killers or southern yellowjackets, and the yellow-legged Asian hornet is a different, smaller species.

Myth: it is the largest wasp in the world. It is the largest hornet, but some tarantula hawk wasps of the Americas and the giant scoliid wasp of Southeast Asia rival or exceed it in body length or wingspan.

Fact: it is a threat to beekeeping, not to wild honey bees in Asia. Native Asian honey bees have defenses that work, while the introduced western honey bee does not, which is why officials worked so hard to stop the hornet from spreading in North America.