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Vacuum Hunter vs. Japanese Hornets

October 4th, 2008 by James

It’s only been a couple week’s since Asahi TV news did a report on menacing giant hornets, but they’ve decided the hornet threat is so great that it warrants more attention. Here is a segment that aired this week about a exterminator in Ehime Prefecture that uses powerful vacuums to kill giant hornets.


The man in the video is Mr. Tokunaga (AKA “Vacuum Hunter”), a bee keeper in Ehime Prefecture who got fed up with seeing his precious bees slaughtered by giant hornets. Instead of starting fires to kill hornets, he has created powerful vacuums to suck them into a giant death box. His goal for the day is 5,000 dead hornets. He first lures giant hornets into bait traps, and then ties markets onto their legs so he can track them as they fly back to their nests. When a nest is located, it’s vacuum time!


In the second clip, Vacuum Hunter locates a nest along a path that is too narrow for his van. To bring his vacuum system close enough for an attack, he calls up a friend who provides a small tractor. He uses a chainsaw to extract the nest from the inside of a tree, and many a hornet is sucked to its death. He ends the day with a haul of 13kg of nest (market price: about $500), and about 2,000 dead hornets. It’s a few thousand hornets short of his goal, but still impressive. Tokunaga vows to continue his work, and will probably adjust the size of the death box before next year’s giant hornet season.



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14 Comments »

Comment by Dodger
2008-10-04 11:43:22

Those bees are mean!

Scary scary!

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Comment by Kaishin
2008-10-04 12:06:18

Seems like the TV crew in the first clip really loves Guilty Gear!

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Comment by cloneofsnake
2008-10-04 12:51:08

This is a typical human way of dealing with nature… in other words guaranteed to fail! LOL But hella entertaining to watch tho! :D

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Comment by k
2008-10-04 13:01:35

who buys hornets nest?

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Comment by revil
2008-10-04 13:46:37

Hornets?

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Comment by koaboko
2008-10-04 13:14:37

KILLEM ALL!!!

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Comment by Sen
2008-10-04 13:48:47

haha..very interesting. I have no sympathy for those hornets, esp. after experiencing a wasp infestation.

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Comment by feitclub
2008-10-04 15:41:05

Bees VS Hornets

Whoever wins, we lose.

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Comment by ZoneDaiatlas
2008-10-04 23:55:17

I’ve seen a Documentary about the Killer Bees on the Discovery Channel Theater HD. The Killer Bees wiped out nest after nest of Hornets. These Japanese Hornets wouldn’t even stand a chance against the Killer Bees

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Comment by Bob
2008-10-04 15:56:58

Waiting with anticipation at the outcome of this. I can’t wait to see if others join in the crusade to ride Japan of this ‘pest’. It occurs to me that this may be an unwise course of action. How many other insects does each of these hornets feed on in a day? I don’t mean the human-friendly insects like bees, I mean the other insects, the destructive or painful kind – roaches, mukade etc…

As a similar example, just take a look at Tokyo. How many crows do you see in a day? … and how many other smaller types of birds do you see? The BB-gun mentality of successive generations of school kids has all but wiped out the resident small-bird population, leaving the much larger crows to increase their numbers. Ironically, it is the larger crows that are left which intimidate the hell out of school kids.

Yes, in the absence of hornets, it should be quite interesting to find out if we will have an increase in the occurence of the meaner insects, that are currently consumed by the resident hornets.

Keep the current balance, until you know what you’re going to get in its place.

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Comment by Donger
2008-10-06 06:57:27

But aren’t we also having some sort of “global pollination problem” of sorts with the reduction in the number of honey bees in the world due to the global warming phenomenon?

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Comment by Izzy
2008-10-05 13:25:58

He took out some 2,000 hornets. If I recall correctly, something like 5 hornets can completely destory a 2,000 strong bee hive.

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