They're Not Just Great Outfits For Battling Giant Hornets, They Make You Look Like Members Of Devo

[hatrack]

By now you’ve surely seen the pictures: A dozen humanoid forms encased in full-body, white nylon suits are working on scaffolding at the base of a saran-wrapped tree by the red glow of headlamps, one of them raising a plexiglass vacuum tube between its blue-gloved hands in triumph. Inside, 85 wasps, each the size of a human thumb, are piled against one another in cold-induced slumber. No, these weren’t scenes from the next great biothreat thriller. Over the weekend, Washington State Department of Agriculture workers took out the first Asian giant hornet nest found in the United States. Come to think of it, it was sort of a biothreat thriller. A bit anticlimactic, perhaps. But it had great costumes.

The enormous honeybee-beheading predator, nicknamed the “murder hornet,” was first discovered in Whatcom County late last year. Since then, state entomologists have been working nonstop to track the invasive insect, using traps and radio transmitters in the hope of locating their nests and eradicating them before they can gain a foothold in the Pacific Northwest. But taking out a nest is dangerous work. With a 6-millimeter, automatically-reloading stinger, the hornet can inject massive amounts of venom into its victims. It can also spray that venom from a distance. In Japan, they kill about 50 people every year.

Normal beekeeping outfits won’t cut it. Last year, when a Canadian team tackled an Asian giant hornet nest in Nanaimo, British Columbia, where the hornet first turned up in North America, the person tasked with the extraction wore two pairs of pants as well as a Kevlar vest under his regular apiarist attire. Despite all that, he described the seven stings he suffered as “similar to having red-hot thumb tacks driven into the flesh.” So what’s an Asian giant hornet hunter to do? Head to Amazon, of course.

“Basically, we started this project with a relatively small budget,” says WSDA entomologist Chris Looney, who was charged with leading the Washington hornet eradication. A lot of that money had to go toward the thousands of traps his team ended up laying across the northwestern part of the state this year. “So when someone in our safety office said, ‘Here’s some on Amazon that we can afford,’ we gave it a shot.”

EDIT

https://www.wired.com/story/what-to-wear-when-youre-battling-giant-venomous-hornets/

[iwillalwayswonderwhy]

1. A running joke last week in UK's Have I Got News For You

It looks like somebody bleached the minions.

[Baitball Blogger]

2. And it makes you look like you're walking backwards.

[underpants]

3. Damn look at the package on that one