A Franco-Chinese team tested a mixture of three molecules likely to attract males to trap them and help control this invasive species – but eradication seems excluded.
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Will the concupiscence be the tomb of the Asian hornet? The idea of trapping the males of this invasive species by attracting them through the sex pheromones produced by the females makes its way. A Franco-Chinese study published February 7 in Entomologia Generalis suggests that a new molecular cocktail would be more effective for luring the male representatives of Vespa Velutina.
Since its first detection in France in 2005, the hymenoptere colonized Europe. Voracious, he attacks wild pollinators, but also ravages in the ranks of Apis Mellifera, the domestic bee – when he does not sticking, sometimes fatally, humans. Beekeepers are trying to deal with the intruder with various pitfalls and bait, but they lack efficiency and specificity: on 100 trapped insects, it is estimated that 95 are not Asian horns.
Eric Darrouzet (CNRS, University of Tours) and his Chinese colleagues have thus started in the footsteps of sexual pheromones specific to this species, produced by the breeding females to attract males. In 2017, two promising molecules had already been identified, after levying on glands between the sternites, these plates that divide the abdomen. In this study, a third compound, produced in less than the animal, has been detected, thanks to a conventional method of gas chromatography coupled to a mass spectrometer.
The team then tested the effectiveness of several combinations representing various proportions of these three molecules, and identified the most effective during tests in nature, in France and China, with populations slightly different from the insect. The mixture was placed on a blottle near a dead hor of “calling”, as in duck hunt. The study shows that the pheromone effect is maximal with a molecule more than the two previously identified. “And it is the mix of the three, with a precise ratio, which allows to attract the males”, summarizes Eric Darrouzet.
Aiming the founding queen of a nest
remains to use this attraction. The molecules, easy to reproduce chemically, can not be patented, but the researcher was contacted by a company, with which a partnership will be put in place “to carry out new tests and develop the trap”. “She will then market it,” he says.
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