The question at this stage becomes: Do we want to support that movement? Indeed, we are all busy with our own jobs and the answer is not straightforward. Lorenzo decides to take the lead and support the movement. He is already in the bee world with BroodMinder developing remote beehive monitoring tools.

Now the vision has evolved to something more ambitious: we want to achieve a much larger impact: We believe that everyone has to be able to trap Asian hornets and make a personal contribution to biodiversity preservation. Ornetin being a selective trap, spreading this idea becomes possible.

Supporting that movement also means investing time and money to develop a product that can become widely accessible to everyone.  We are early 2023 and we need a trademark: ORNETIN is born, together with a logo and some very simple schematics of how the trap works. We also set up a dedicated website with the objective to widely share resources with the public.

Now we are facing another issue, a big one related to customer delivery: the trap is 3D-printed using our personal printers. It takes 4:30 to print just one trap: impossible to spread it widely! We need to change our production process. A plastic injection mold is needed, but a mold is expensive! Therefore, we decided to engage again the community for support. We are launching a crowdfunding campaign (ulule.com/ornetin) with the objective of collecting funding to manufacture the mold. After 40 days of campaigning, 281 contributors helped us reach the threshold of 12,000€ to fund the mold. And beyond this, those 280 persons from 7 countries are rewarded with 834 Ornetin so that they will be trapped in their location too! Joining the community.

At the same time, crowdfunding is a great opportunity to develop awareness about Asian hornets and the threat they pose to our biodiversity. We make a large social media communication campaign to spread the word and increase awareness with no less than 85 posts published on Facebook and Instagram 

In November 2023 we updated the user guide and the website. We want to make it more friendly and overall, add the feedback collected from many users during the last months.

And this is where the story arrived so far. We keep being very active and developing new things. If you want to join our initiative, you can do many different things

• You can learn from our resources page.
• You can trap with us.
• If you’re already trapping, you can share your knowledge
• You can talk about our vision to your local club beekeeping, and gardening association.
• Or just send us a note!