Besides the traps, Covilhã City Council, in the district of Castelo Branco, also wants to create its own monitoring platform in order to fight and control the invasive species Velutina wasp, also known as Asian hornet. The platform will allow its users to look at a map and check for Asian hornet’s primary and secondary nests as well as verify where they were last detected.

Luís Marques, municipal Civil Protection coordinator, has told Lusa that “We now have our own municipal platform, in addition to SOS Vespa, which geo references the nests, where we can collect information and find out where we carried out the extermination, where they are located, what type of nest, and we will do the even for traps, to create a municipal database on the velutina wasp”, stating that the main aim is “to try to capture the largest number of founding wasps, so that new nests do not appear”.

Due to Asian hornet’s predatory nature and ability to kill honey bee colonies, beekeepers who own colonies have suffered losses. As a result, the municipality of Covilhã in the Municipal Strategy to Combat Velutina Wasp meeting agreed to give out 400 traps to registered beekeepers, five for each of them, which started in August of last year. “We want to ensure that we are able to exterminate 80 percent of the nests within 24 hours of reporting and 100 percent of the nests within 48 hours of reporting”, Luís Marques has said.

The goal, according to Luís Marques, is to react to notifications as quickly as possible. 368 nests were destroyed by Covilhã’s Municipal Civil Protection last year, down from 85 in 2022, "an increase of 400 percent compared to the previous year," the spokesperson stated. Experts say that it is now impossible to “put an end to this invasive species,” which is why Luís Marques underlined the significance of taking steps to “minimize its proliferation”.