Full-time apiarist Denise Camilleri took to social media on Monday morning to share that oriental hornets have devastated her business' hives. She and other beekeepers are reiterating their appeal for authorities to support them and to take action to control hornet populations.

Camilleri stressed that diminishing bee populations is a matter of national food security. She suggested for a committee to be set up and for a national effort to search and destroy hornet nets to be carried out to make this situation manageable.

"If bees die, people can forget about having food," she said, "Once bees die, grass will not remain pollinated - it's a big problem. If bees keep dying, this will be a big-scale cataclysm."

In videos she uploaded online, Camilleri can be heard sobbing as she showed off her empty bee box that was previously packed full of honeybees. "It's a disaster," she said, noting the serious financial and emotional burden incurred.

Speaking to this newsroom, Camilleri said that her and her partner have done everything they could throughout this summer to protect their bee colonies, in the face of this summer's hornet invasion and serious drought, across their 15 different sites. However, "out of about 30 hives, only around three are maybe salvageable," she said.

Their major losses have come in spite of their best efforts, every day, across this summer.

With beekeeping being how they make their living, for their company "Golden Island Honey," they have invested in many hornet traps.

These included entrance guards, electric harps that zap hornets without harming bees, and bait traps - though the sheer hornet numbers were too much to control as traps "only kill a few of them" in the bigger picture.

Camilleri shared that they were waking up at 4:30am every morning this summer to check on their bee colonies and do their utmost to protect them.

Aside from keeping their bees safe from oriental hornets, apiarists had to keep their bees wellfed during this summer's "total drought." Camilleri told this newsroom that bees were under stress because they didn't have much to eat and whatever they had, hornets would get them first.

According to Camilleri, producing honey after losing a bee box takes a year at minimum. "To rebuild, I need to split my boxes and hope for a good winter and spring for flowers to bloom," she said.

"I have never been as close to throwing in the towel as much as today," Camilleri said.

She said that she raised most of her hives herself, starting out with a queen bee and a ball of honey.

This newsroom interviewed Camilleri's partner, apiarist Ray Sciberras, eight days prior to this update. Sciberras had warned that Malta's beekeeping industry required urgent intervention and assistance from authorities as increasing amounts of hornets have attacked bee colonies all summer long.

He had told

that one site had diminished from about 15 bee colonies to just five. Eight days later, hornets have devastated their bee colonies.

Sciberras has four decades of experience in beekeeping, Camilleri has been doing this for 10 years. It is normal for hornets to come to Malta during the summer, Camilleri said, though while this has been "controllable" in past summers, hornet numbers exploded this year, and this summer was "terrible."

Camilleri described what she found on Monday morning as "exponential damage," likening it to a city bombing from the Second World War. She has since relocated her surviving bees to a different site to improve their chances at survival and to keep her business alive.

No compensation scheme has yet been made available by the government and Camilleri is unaware whether one is in the pipeline. She noted that compensation was given at an "insulting" €10 per bee box lost three years ago - the last summer when hornets decimated local bee populations - that provided professional beekeepers with the same level of compensation that hobbyists were able to apply for.

Camilleri told The Malta Independent that hornets have been so devastating because local bees cannot simply be replaced. After varroa mites caused serious damage to Maltese honeybee populations in the 1990s, other species of honeybees were imported from abroad to repopulate them and support the local ecosystem; however, after DNA testing, we now know that this has hybridised Maltese honeybees as a species. Hence, to safeguard the Maltese honeybee - which was declared Malta's national insect in September 2024 - "it was decided that it's best for us not to import foreign bees," Camilleri noted.

She hopes for national authorities to take immediate action against hornets in the Maltese islands to conserve local bee populations, before even more get wiped out to the point that people begin to worry about being able to have food on the table. She also hopes for a compensation scheme to be offered very soon to local beekeepers.

"If no-one helps, we can pack up shop," she said.

Till then, Camilleri and Sciberras are going further out of pocket to adequately dispose of their lost bee colonies.

Camilleri also told this newsroom that other beekeepers are considering taking action against authorities for this situation.