It probably came from British Columbia. A nest of them was found just over the border in September.
Unlikely it came from the nest that was found and destroyed, as that nest was in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, so a big chunk of water between the nest and where this one was found. I spoke to the folks that found the nest and eradicated it only a couple days after it was dealt with.
The nest found in Nanaimo is an interesting story, there was a significant urgency to finding it as the discovery of those hornets was about the time of the year they would be starting to produce queens for wintering and starting new colonies next year. They knew it was somewhere in the area, one of the club beekeepers had seen one catching bees at a hive, so they caught it and forwarded the dead specimen to the provincial ag department for identification. When the nest was found, they used fire extinguishers to smother it in CO2 while digging it up and getting the combs and brood intact. They were putting the insects into alchohol as they pulled them out, knocked out by the CO2. An entimologist went over every dead insect and active brood cell to check for queens. One fertile laying queen was found, and no young queens either present or in development.
And just to give you an idea of how reslient these things are. I attended a meeting of the Nanaimo bee club a few days after the nest was found. One of the combs was passed around for us to take a good look at the larvae. That comb had spent 3 days in the fridge, and 2 days in the freezer at that point, and the larvae had not been fed. Some of them were still wiggling.
The question everybody has been asking since then, how did it get there, and are there more ? Lots of thoughts around 'arrived on a ship' but no real answers. The nest in Nanaimo was about a half mile from the harbour in a park. All the bee clubs on the island from Duncan up to Campbell River have had presentations that included show and tell with preserved specimens of those hornets. Everybody knows what they look like and will be on the lookout for them next spring. After the found nest was eradicated, no sign of them in traps or otherwise on the island, so there are high hopes the discovery was a 'one off'.
I must admit, reading about another discovery in Blaine is not what I wanted to hear.
