💡 Yellow-legged hornet sighting reports & community alerts

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Summary

Add a geo-aware Vespa velutina (yellow-legged hornet) sighting + alert layer to Broodly: let beekeepers report hornet sightings, automatically warn nearby Broodly users when an incursion is reported within their foraging radius, and integrate with national reporting programs (USDA APHIS, UK/Wales gov, NZ Biosecurity). On the recommendation engine side, raise inspection priority for "hornet pressure" colonies and surface defensive interventions (entrance reducers, muzzles, trapping) with the same confidence-first contract as every other recommendation.

Market Signal

• The yellow-legged hornet is now an active USDA APHIS regulated pest in the southeastern US, with Wales and most of Europe already affected.
• New Zealand ramped up radio-tracking destruction operations in Q1 2026 — an early signal that government programs are racing to contain the spread, but they have no consumer-facing reporting channel that beekeepers actually use.
• Active research on BLE-based hornet tracking systems and optical sensors with ML classification shows hardware partners will exist within Broodly's lifetime — but the reporting + community alerting layer is wide open.
• Zero major beekeeping apps (HiveTracks, BeePlus, Apiary Book, Apivetus, BeeKeepPal, BroodMinder, Mellisphera, APiLOG, VarroaVault) currently offer hornet sighting reporting or community alerts.

User Signal

• The PRD's emphasis on "context-aware prioritization" and "outcome-improving interventions" maps directly onto invasive predator pressure as a missing input signal. Hornets are arguably the single largest new threat to small-commercial European beekeepers in the 2024–2026 window.
• Beekeepers in affected regions (UK, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, US Southeast) currently rely on Facebook groups and WhatsApp threads for sighting alerts — a clear UX gap an opinionated app can fill.

Technical Opportunity

• The existing apiary domain model (apps/api/internal/domain/) already has geolocation. Adding a PestSighting aggregate with a PostGIS-backed proximity query is a small, additive change.
• Push notifications via Firebase Cloud Messaging (already in the auth stack) deliver the alerts.
• The recommendation engine cleanly accepts a new priority modifier ("hornet pressure within X km in the last 14 days"), keeping the change isolated to one rule rather than touching the engine internals.
• Reports can be optionally federated upstream to APHIS/Biosecurity NZ/etc. via opt-in — a cheap public-good feature that creates a defensible community moat.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	high	Pure additive feature: one new aggregate, one priority modifier, one push channel. PostGIS is standard PG.
Impact	medium	High in affected geographies (Europe + US Southeast + parts of NZ), low everywhere else. Concentrated value.
Urgency	high	Spread is active and unlocking community network effects depends on being first; reporting habit forms once.

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: "This is geographically narrow. Most of our addressable market (continental US, Canada, much of Australia) doesn't have yellow-legged hornet pressure yet. We'd be building a feature that's invisible to 60%+ of users."

Rebuttal: Two answers. (1) The same PestSighting aggregate generalizes trivially to any regional pest — small hive beetle in the US Southeast, Tropilaelaps if/when it lands, even bears in northern climates. Building it for hornets first means the next pest takes a config change, not a feature. (2) The European market is currently underserved by US-centric beekeeping apps; shipping the hornet feature is one of the few credible ways to enter that market without a full localization push. Geographic narrowness is a targeting strategy, not a defect.

Suggested Next Step

Discuss with the team whether European market entry is on the 12-month roadmap. If yes, create a product brief covering: (1) the PestSighting data model and PostGIS proximity query, (2) a privacy review for federated reporting (apiary location is sensitive), (3) a UX spike on the "alert when hornet sighted within X km" notification flow with sensible defaults for privacy, and (4) outreach to one EU beekeeping association (e.g., a regional French syndicat) to validate the reporting workflow against their existing channels.

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Proposed by the BMAD Analyst (Mary) on 2026-04-07.
Workflow run

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Weekly Update

What Changed

New research validates the technical feasibility of hornet detection:

• A multi-modal recognition framework combining low-resolution infrared imagery with 3D flight trajectories has been published for identifying Vespa velutina (yellow-legged hornet) and Vespa orientalis in unconstrained outdoor conditions. This demonstrates that automated hornet detection is moving from research to practical deployment.
• MobileNet-based deep learning pipelines have achieved 95% classification accuracy across six bee health conditions including pest infestations, enabling on-device identification. This suggests phone-camera-based hornet identification is feasible.
• BroodMinder's BeeTV and BeeDar hardware (~100 units expected mid-2026) includes camera-based monitoring that could eventually include predator detection, representing potential integration partners for this feature.
• Climate research confirms warmer autumns and winters are expanding the range of invasive hornet species, increasing the relevance of community alert systems in previously unaffected regions.

Updated Assessment

Dimension	Previous	Current	Delta
Feasibility	—	med	→ (first assessment; ML models exist but community alert system requires critical mass)
Impact	—	med	→ (high impact in affected regions, low in others — geographic variability)
Urgency	—	low	→ (Vespa velutina range expansion is gradual; no competitor ships this; important but not time-pressured)

Recommendation

Keep watching — The ML research validates that automated identification is becoming feasible, but the community alert system requires a user base that doesn't exist yet. This is a compelling differentiator for European and Pacific Northwest markets where V. velutina is an active threat, but premature for MVP. Revisit when user base reaches sufficient geographic density in affected regions, or when BroodMinder's BeeTV hardware creates an integration opportunity for passive hornet detection.