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My husband and I were occupied with work yesterday afternoon when I heard this deep, intense buzzing noise coming from our bedroom. Chris stayed on his phone call but I went to inspect. I was about to dismiss the noise when finally this thing appeared (pictured above). Um, I screamed because..well. look at it! But my husband who’s trained in the handling of seemingly dangerous animals managed to catch it. I will spare you the details of how it came to pass but suffice to say the next morning (today) it was unresponsive and thus we preserved the lifeless body in ethanol and decided to ID and photograph it.

Initially, what I thought we were looking at was a “murder hornet” (Vespa mandarinia). It had been reported that the giant Asian Hornet had recently arrived in Philadelphia and I am but a few short minutes drive away from the city and thought, well, that was fast! My husband had his doubts and began going through his field books to properly identify what species of hornet we were looking at.

We found out via https://extension.psu.edu/european-hornet that this was in fact NOT a murder hornet--it was a European Hornet (Vespa crabro) a very large wasp native to Europe that has been here since the 1800′s.

I’m pretty sure there is a nest somewhere close by because I saw another one hanging out by my office window earlier this afternoon. I’m hoping we can keep them out of our house and at a safe distance from our home because I would hate to have to harm these magnificent creatures.