Asian Yellow-Legged Hornets Aid Thich Nhat Hanh Mindfulness Trainings

Summary: Asian yellow-legged hornets are one less after August's pen-stabbing about an hour away from France's New Hamlet monastery of founder Thich Nhat Hanh.

Asian yellow-legged hornet (Vespa velutina nigrothorax) on rockspray cotoneaster (Cotoneaster horizontalis), Périgueux, Dordogne, southwestern France; Friday, May 14, 2010, 14:43: Père Igor, CC BY SA 3.0 Unported, via Wikimedia Commons

Asian yellow-legged hornets are one down after August's pen-stabbing by a bus driver for the Libourne route to New Hamlet, Dordogne Valley monastery in the Plum Village Tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Jeff McMahon broaches for Forbes online Sept. 8, 2019, the first mindfulness training by Plum Village founder Thich Nhat Hanh barring oneself and others from killing. His article It Takes Courage to Revere Nature, And Now Is the Time for Courage considers all aboard cheering or condoning, not chiding, cornering the captive. Asian yellow-legged hornets only draw their stingers, no more fatally poisonous than European Vespidae (from Latin vespa, "wasp" and Greek -ειδής, "-like") family members for self-defense.

Asian yellow-legged hornets establish 500 to 1,500-brooded, 2.46 to 2.95-foot (0.75 to 0.9-meter-) high nests, sometimes 10-plus-combed, in human-made structures and non-coniferous rural and urban trees.

Day-active life cycles between April and November, with August-September peaks, furnish male and worker Asian yellow-legged hornets with 0.67 to 0.98-inch (17 to 25-millimeter-) head-body lengths.

Asian yellow-legged hornets, Vespa velutina nigrithorax (from Latin vespa, "wasp"; velutina, "velvety"; niger, "black"; and thōrāx, "thorax"), get 1.18 to 1.38-inch (30 to 35-millimeter-) long queens. They have velvety black-grown thoraxes with four dark wings, unlike median wasps (Dolichovespula media) with yellow-marked dark thoaxes and two-winged, dark-legged hornet mimic hoverflies (Volucella zonaria). Asian yellow-legged hornets, identified by Robert du Buysson (May 6, 1861-March 16, 1946), integrated orange faces with black-brown heads and orange-banded fourth segments onto black-brown abdomens.

Dark-antennaed Asian yellow-legged hornets and yellow-antennaed European hornets (Vespa crabro) and giant wood-wasps (Urocerus gigas) sometimes journey about on their yellow-ended brown, yellow, and brown-ended legs.

The fourth mindfulness training, on interconnected suffering, by Thich Nhat Hanh optimally kindles knowing Asian yellow-legged hornets as predatory prey in life-giving, life-taking survivalist food chains.

Asian yellow-legged hornets locate as Asian and continental European prey mainly membranous-winged (Hymenoptera), next majorly true fly (Diptera) and minorly beetle (Coleoptera) and cockroach (Blattaria) orders. Continental European butterfly and moth (Lepidoptera), caddisfly (Trichoptera), earwig (Dermaptera), folded-wing (Orthoptera), net-winged (Neuroptera), scorpionfly (Mecoptera) and true bug (Hemiptera, Heteroptera) orders make up minor prey. Continental European predators near the French entry ports needed to negotiate or nullify such numerously nutritious prey as bird and mammal carcasses and 12 invertebrate orders.

Chickadees (Paridae), European bee-eaters (Merops apiaster), European honey buzzards (Pernis apivorus), green woodpeckers (Picus viridis) and jays (Garrulus glandarius) less than optimally obstructed Asian yellow-legged hornets.

Predatory French insect-killing fungi, nematodes and parasitic flies (Conops vesicularis) never prevented Asian yellow-legged wasps progressing through 46,332.26 square miles (120,000 square kilometers) within three years.

Asian yellow-legged hornets quit their Asian homelands in cut flowers; freight containers; garden furniture and pots; soils anchoring fruiting non-woody and woody plants; and untreated timber. They ranged from southern France in 2004 southwestward into the Balearic Islands, Portugal and Spain; southeastward into Italy; and northward into Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. Imported products and independent flight perhaps supported their spread into the United Kingdom by the Channel Islands to Gloucestershire in 2016 and North Devon in 2017.

Thich Nhat Hanh perhaps teaches us, to paraphrase Nobel Laureate singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, to empathize with human-transported Asian yellow-legged hornets that wish they had stayed home.

Nobel Laureate singer/songwriter Bob Dylan's Zen Buddhist-themed oil painting, The Monk, was included in the October 2011 exhibition Bob Dylan: The Asia Series at Gagosian Gallery's New York City space: Lion's Roar @lionsroarbuddhism, via Facebook Oct. 13, 2016

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Asian yellow-legged hornet (Vespa velutina nigrithorax) on rockspray cotoneaster (Cotoneaster horizontalis), Périgueux, Dordogne, southwestern France; Friday, May 14, 2010, 14:43: Père Igor, CC BY SA 3.0 Unported, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vespa_velutina_Dordogne_(2).JPG

Nobel Laureate singer/songwriter Bob Dylan's Zen Buddhist-themed oil painting, The Monk, was included in the October 2011 exhibition Bob Dylan: The Asia Series at Gagosian Gallery's New York City space: Lion's Roar @lionsroarbuddhism, via Facebook Oct. 13, 2016, @ https://www.facebook.com/lionsroarbuddhism/posts/663928600436797

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