‘Murder hornets’ declared eradicated from U.S. after no Blaine detections

State and federal agriculture officials have declared the ‘murder hornet,’ officially known as the northern giant hornet, eradicated in the U.S. after three years have passed without finding any evidence of the invasive species.

The Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the northern giant hornets’ eradication in a December 18 statement, marking just over five years since the first hornet was discovered in Blaine and brought the community to the center of an international media flurry.

“Without the public’s support for this effort, it is unlikely we would be announcing the eradication of northern giant hornet today,” said Sven Spichiger, WSDA pest program manager, in the statement. “All of our nest detections resulted directly or indirectly from public reports. And half of our confirmed detections came from the public. The people of Washington can be proud that we did this by working together.”

The hornet was introduced to Washington state and B.C. in 2019, though officials still are not certain how it arrived to North America. After the hornet was discovered in Blaine in December 2019, state entomologists eradicated the first northern giant hornet nest found in east Blaine in October 2020. No hornets have been found in Whatcom County since 2021, when three nests related to “nest zero” were eradicated in east Blaine.

Only Washington and B.C. reported hornet sightings. A person photographed an insect appearing to be a northern giant hornet near Port Orchard in October 2024, but WSDA didn’t receive the insect and was unable to test it. A decayed hornet was found in Snohomish County in 2020 and DNA testing showed the hornet wasn’t related to the hornets found in Blaine.

The B.C. hornets were discovered in Nanaimo in August 2019 and later the Lower Mainland, though DNA testing later revealed the B.C. hornets were introduced separately from the U.S. hornets. In 2021, the last confirmed hornet was found in B.C., when one decayed hornet was discovered just north of east Blaine.