How the Asian Hornet Spread Across Europe, 2004–2026: An Animated Map

One Queen in a Box of Pottery

Somewhere around 2004 a mated queen of the yellow-legged hornet, Vespa velutina nigrithorax, came ashore in south-west France, most probably hibernating in a consignment of pottery from China delivered to a horticulturist near Tonneins in Lot-et-Garonne. A resident near Tombebœuf noticed 'Chinese hornets' around his house that summer. In November 2005 the amateur entomologist Jean-Pierre Bouguet caught one in his garden in Nérac, and Haxaire, Bouguet and Tamisier described the new arrival in 2006. Genetic work by Arca and colleagues (2015) later showed that the European population descends from a single queen mated with a handful of males.

This map follows what happened next. Each area is coloured by the year the hornet was first recorded there, from dark purple for 2004 to yellow for 2026, so the invasion reads like the rings of a tree: an old core in Aquitaine, wide rings across France, and young yellow edges in the Netherlands, western Germany, Switzerland, southern England and the Mediterranean coast of Spain.

France: About 60 Kilometres a Year

By 2006 the hornet was in 13 French départements and by 2012 in 56, according to a 2019 French Senate report. The national monitoring at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN) puts the natural spread at roughly 60 km a year, but the map also shows islands of early records far ahead of the front, around Paris, in Burgundy and in Normandy. These are the typical signature of a species whose queens hibernate in wood piles, garden furniture, lorries and camping gear and are carried hundreds of kilometres before they wake up. Within a few years the front caught up with them, and by around 2018 the hornet was found in nearly all of mainland France except the colder mountains (it reached Corsica only in 2024).

Over the Pyrenees and the Alps

The first Spanish record came in August 2010 near Amaiur in Navarra, followed by Gipuzkoa; Navarra went from 2 nests in 2010 to 95 destroyed in 2012. In September 2011 specimens were collected at Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal, and from there the hornet moved south through the temperate west of Portugal at about 40 km a year, and north into Galicia (2012), Asturias (2014) and along the whole Cantabrian coast. Catalonia followed, and Mallorca had its first nests in the Serra de Tramuntana in 2015. The island was declared free in 2020, but new nests turned up in 2021 and again from 2024, from at least two further introductions.

In Italy the University of Turin's traps caught the first hornet at Loano in Liguria in November 2012. By 2015 western Liguria was invaded up to about 55 km from the French border, after which an EU LIFE project (STOPVESPA) slowed the spread to a few kilometres a year. Later records come from Tuscany, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Lecce in the far south (2024) and Sardinia (2025).

North: Germany, the Low Countries and Switzerland

Germany's first hornets were photographed in a garden in Waghäusel near Karlsruhe in September 2014, and the first nest was found that November in Büchelberg. Belgium had a single hornet in 2011 and its first nest near Tournai in November 2016. The Netherlands followed with a nest at Dreischor in Zeeland in September 2017, after which the population moved north at about 58 km a year to more than 500 nests in 2023, and the Dutch gave up on eradication. Switzerland's first was a queen caught by a beekeeper at Fregiécourt in the canton of Jura in April 2017; Swiss nest finds grew from 11 in 2022 to 222 in 2023, 785 in 2024 and 3,030 in 2025. Luxembourg's first nests were found at Junglinster in 2020. In March 2025 Germany reclassified the hornet as an established species and dropped the legal duty to destroy every nest.

Britain, Ireland and the Channel Islands

Jersey has had the hornet since August 2016 and found 694 nests in 2025. Great Britain's first nest was destroyed at Tetbury in Gloucestershire in September 2016; genetic work by Budge and colleagues (2017) pointed to transport from France rather than a flight across the Channel. For years there were only a handful of finds a year, until 2023, when 56 confirmed sightings, most of them around Folkestone, Dover and Deal, made Kent the hot spot. In 2025 the UK recorded 544 credible sightings and destroyed 161 nests, with outliers as far as Runcorn, North Yorkshire and the Isles of Scilly. Ireland had a single hornet in Dublin in 2021 and its first two nests around Cork in 2025, and Northern Ireland its first nest in east Belfast in October 2025.

Why It Matters for Honeybees

The hornet is a generalist predator of insects, but honeybees are an easy, concentrated prey. Workers hover in front of a hive and snatch returning foragers out of the air. The bees answer by staying inside, so the colony stops bringing in nectar and pollen (foraging paralysis) and can starve or fail to make it through the winter. Requier and colleagues (2023) estimated the cost of colony losses caused by the hornet at €30.8 million a year in France alone, and in Spain it became the eighth most costly invasive species within ten years of its arrival (US$5.3 million of management costs in 2020). The hornet also damages soft fruit such as grapes and preys on wild pollinators.

How to Recognise and Report It

The yellow-legged hornet is smaller and darker than the native European hornet: a mostly black-brown body with a single yellow-orange band near the end of the abdomen, an orange face and legs that are yellow at the tips. The European hornet is larger and reddish-brown with a mostly yellow abdomen. If you think you have seen one, take a photo if it is safe and report it to your national scheme: the Asian Hornet Watch app or the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology's online form in the UK, invasives.ie in Ireland, the MNHN's reporting site in France, Vespa-Watch in Belgium, waarneming.nl in the Netherlands and the national Asian hornet platform in Switzerland. In countries where the hornet is still rare, a single report can lead the authorities to a nest before it releases hundreds of new queens in the autumn. Leave the nest itself to professionals.

How to Read the Map

Each colour is a year of first record, from dark purple (2004) through pink and orange to yellow (2026). Within each year the newly reached area grows outwards from the new records, then stays. Land is painted only within 25 km of records that recur, meaning another record within 40 km in the following two years, so one-off finds and probable misidentifications are not painted. Those one-off finds (Dublin, Plzeň, Kimle, Salzburg, Palárikovo, Kertinge on Funen, Belfast and others) are shown as teal pins; red pins mark each country's first record and blue pins add context. No area is coloured before its country's documented first record.

This is a map of detection, not of density or of the hornet's current status. It follows recording effort: Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, with intensive citizen-science schemes, are mapped in fine detail, while parts of inland Spain, Italy and the French interior have fewer records, so the hornet may have arrived there a year or two earlier than shown, or be present where the map is blank. Places where the hornet was later wiped out, such as Mallorca's first population (declared eradicated in 2020), stay coloured.

How the Map Was Made

The main source is GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (occurrence data downloaded on 31 October 2026), which brings together the MNHN's French monitoring, Waarnemingen.be and Observation.org, iNaturalist research-grade observations, the Swiss fauna databanks, the Walloon early-warning system and others. Records from one German platform without expert validation and records rejected by the MNHN were removed. For Great Britain the map uses the UK government's list of laboratory-confirmed sightings since 2016. Where GBIF is thin (western Liguria, the Channel Islands, Portugal, Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, Navarra and Mallorca) published first records were added. National first records come from the 2026 review by Rojas-Nossa and colleagues in the European Journal of Entomology, the EPPO Reporting Service and the original papers.

Chronological Timeline

• c. 2004 — A queen arrives in Lot-et-Garonne, probably with pottery from China
• November 2005 — First specimen identified at Nérac
• 2006 — The hornet is in 13 French départements
• August 2010 — First Spanish record near Amaiur, Navarra
• 2011 — Portugal: Viana do Castelo (September); a single hornet in Belgium
• 2012 — 56 French départements; first Italian hornet at Loano, Liguria
• September 2014 — Germany: Waghäusel near Karlsruhe
• October 2015 — Mallorca: nests in the Serra de Tramuntana
• 2016 — Jersey (August), Britain's first nest at Tetbury (September), Belgium's first nest (November)
• 2017 — Switzerland (April) and the Netherlands (September)
• 2019 — A hornet in Hamburg, then the northernmost record in the world
• 2020 — Luxembourg; established nests in Geneva
• 2021 — A single hornet in Dublin
• 2023 — The Kent surge; first records in Hungary and Czechia
• 2024 — Austria, Slovakia and Corsica; Swiss nests pass 700
• March 2025 — Germany classifies the hornet as established
• 2025 — Firsts in Denmark, Sardinia and Northern Ireland; Ireland's first nests in Cork; 544 credible UK sightings
• June 2026 — First nests in Austria, at Lustenau in Vorarlberg