Invasive Asian hornets are "highly flexible predators" that eat hundreds of different species of insects, including many important pollinators, researchers have warned. Researchers from the University of Exeter carried out analysis to identify prey in the guts of more than 1,

Of the top 50 invertebrate prey species that the team identified, 43 are known to visit flowers. Europe’s top three main crop pollinators–the European honey bee, the buff-tailed bumblebee and the red-tailed bumblebee–were also represented in the samples.

A study of Asian hornets has found about 1,400 different species in their guts. University of Exeter researchers tested Asian hornet samples from France, Spain, Jersey and the UK throughout the hornet's active season.