Tetbury, Gloucestershire. 2.30 pm. Wednesday 28 September 2016

      The wind had strengthened again and was blowing in short, powerful flurries. Graham paced up and down, his attention focused on the boundary hedges. Drawn by reports of sightings in the area, the team had last week netted several specimens of the invader that had been hawking for prey on ivy clinging to the trunk of one of the garden’s cypresses. A reliable line of sight had been achieved and further samples dispatched for DNA analysis. But that had been all.

      Graham approached the conifer once more. No activity here today. As he turned back though, something danced in his peripheral vision, something way up in the cypress closest to the house. Was it his imagination? He squinted for a better look. Sure enough, four, five, maybe six, large-ish insects were whirling about the highest branches.

      What the heck were they doing? What on earth was interesting them up there?

      Not yet daring to hope, he reached for his binoculars. Within moments Graham confirmed the target species and shouted over to his colleague.

      ‘Hey Gordon! This could be it!’

      Confidence building, Graham scanned the canopy for a few seconds, but saw only thick evergreen branches whipping and twisting in the wind. Frustrating. He stepped back a pace.

      In that instant, a gust lifted the foliage enough to reveal a tell-tale patch of light brown against the darker trunk. Had he been standing a foot to the left or right, he would have seen nothing. It was just a glimpse, but now he was certain and made the call to the command centre: ‘I think we’ve found the nest.’ All Graham could do now was wait. And pray he was right.

      The National Bee Unit – a division of APHA, the British government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency – has long expected this unwelcome visitor from the far side of the planet. Back home the Asian hornet is on the move, pushing from its native range, on the border of northern India and China, into Indonesia and South Korea. Soon Japan, too, will succumb. The species was confirmed in Europe as early as 2004 when a nest was discovered close to Agen in southwest France. No one really knows how it got there. The best guess is that a year or two earlier some fertile queens had been inadvertently shipped to Bordeaux in a container-load of ceramic pottery from eastern China.

      The hornet found the temperate European conditions, similar to those back home, to its liking. Competition from local hornets was minimal – the Asian variety is smaller than its native counterpart, more like a very large wasp; and far quieter. (Experts say the chug-chug-chug of an approaching European hornet calls to mind a lumbering Chinook helicopter. If so, the newcomer is a Stealth fighter.) And it relished the plentiful supply of food in the shape of other aerial insects.