Where do you find these things? The bit where the poor little honey wunny bee gets sliced in half by a hungry hornet is particularly *awesome/disturbing/stomach-churning (*delete as appropriate).

Yep, it's pretty fearsome stuff. I loved the scenes of the massive hornets moving serenely in for the attack, like Apache helicopters or something. Awesome.

We actually get these around our house sometimes. I came home from work one day and we had a full fledged battle going on between the Osuzumebachi (Japanese Killer Hornets) and Akabachi (Red bees). I was unable to get into my house for about 45 minutes, as this was all happening over our front steps. It was absolutely fascinating, but a bit frightening as well. It was like watching a wide angle shot of a Top Gun style dogfight. The Osuzumebachi would catch and kill an Akabachi and let it fall to the ground as it moved on to its next target. In the end the Osuzumebachi carried all the dead Akabachi back to their nest across the river. I was amazed that I was actually still able to see them when they were over a hundred yards away.

i heard that the killer hornets came over to california through old tires??

http://www.vespa-crabro.de/manda.htm

I just caught one of these suckers, C. The ladies (you know which ones) were freaking out because this monster 'bachi was squatting (upside down) over one of the aircon vents - hmm... might sow a rumour that they've built a nest up there... ;-).

Grabbed a glass, grabbed some paper and caught that thing. I've NEVER seen a winged insect this big. Must've easily been 50mm long - but it was so thick that it was initially mistaken for a bumblebee.

Great fun.

I got a round of applause to exultations of "Hero! Hero!" afterwards. It was wonderful. Truly my 15 minutes of fame.