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The internet’s most feared insect is earning its “murder hornet” nickname.
An Asian giant hornet killed a man in northwest Spain on Sunday after stinging him in the eyebrow, according tolocal reports.
The unidentified 54-year-old beekeeper from Santiago, which is in Spain’s Galicia region, reportedly discovered the hornets’ nest while tending to some of the beehives near his home.
A fellow beekeeper discovered him lying close to the hive and called the paramedics, but it was already too late.
Headlines about the giant “murder hornets” that grow two inches long and kill up to 50 people a year in Japan have been generating a lot of buzz since they recently landed in the U.S. for the first time.
Read more:Giant ‘murder hornet’ is in U.S. to stay, will eventually reach East Coast, experts say
And this has led some entomologists to fear that widespread “murder hornet” panic could lead to people slaughtering millions of bees and wasps by mistake. After all, many on social media cheered for this viral video of a praying mantis decapitating one of the giant hornets.
Watch:Praying mantis eats a murder hornet’s face, becomes Twitter’s new hero
“Millions and millions of innocent native insects are going to die as a result of this,” Dr. Doug Yanega, a professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside, told the Los Angeles Times.
“Folks in China, Korea and Japan have lived side by side with these hornets for hundreds of years, and it has not caused the collapse of human society there,” he added. “My colleagues in Japan, China and Korea are just rolling their eyes in disbelief at what kind of snowflakes we are.”
