Like a scene from a grizzly horror movie, thousands of angry hornets swarmed out of ‘the king of nests’ as an exterminator bashed at the giant structure with a shovel.
The super-sized wasp nest had engulfed half a shed in Patterson, Louisiana, climbing up the walls, spreading over the floor and teaming with thousands of territorial hornets.
Brave exterminator Jude Verret was called to the house and he filmed the extraordinary – and very close encounter – with the angry stinging hornets.
Wearing a protective suit and mask, he approached the shed where the nest was built in many layers upon the shed floor and the belongings abandoned there.
Wasps swarmed onto the exterminator and the camera lense as he approached the nest, and the video showed the stinging insects in horrifying detail and scale.
Thousands of wasps darted out of the giant nest to defend their home as he started to dismantle it with a shovel amid a cacophony of angry buzzing sounds.
‘I’m actually not usually scared,’ he said before the deafening sound of swarming wasps drowned out his words.
As he pulled the nest apart, the air grew increasingly frenetic with darting flecks of yellow and black as the shed was engulfed in a heaving mass of hornets.
The queen could be seen for a moment before she climbed deeper into the nest to hide.
The air grew increasingly dense with raging bees as he dismantled their nest.
The enormous ‘granddaddy’ of hornets nests was found in a shed in Patterson, Louisiana
Bee careful! A brave exterminator was called to the house and he filmed the extraordinary – and very close encounter – with the angry stinging hornets
Horror hornets: Thousands of the wasps darted out of the giant nest to defend their home as he started to dismantle it with a shovel amid a cacophony of angry buzzing sounds
He clarified on camera that the nest does not belong to honey bees – they are hornets, he said definitively.
The amazing video was shared online today.
Hornets are a large member of the wasp family but their stings are more painful than regular wasps because hornet venom contains a large quanitity (5%) of acetylcholine.
Hornets and wasps can sting repeatedly – unlike honey bees they do not die after stinging because their stingers are not barbed and are not pulled out of their bodies.
Although hornets and wasps look very similar, they tend to have very different colony sizes.
Wasps tend to have less than than 100 individuals in a colony while hornet colonies are much larger.
Like other social wasps, hornets build communal nests by chewing wood to make a papery pulp.
Each nest has one queen, who lays eggs and is attended by workers who, while genetically female, cannot lay fertile eggs.