Colony energy economics drive invasion hotspots of Vespa velutina in South Korea

Abstract BACKGROUND The expanded range of the Asian yellow‐legged hornet, Vespa velutina , in South Korea is shaped by colony energy economics with hotspots emerging from energetically advantaged coastal hubs. RESULTS We combined a 4‐year nationwide trapping program (304 sites, 32 964 vespids and 4765 V. velutina at 173 sites) with a mechanistic colony energy kinetic framework, using a generative adversarial network solely to sample and summarize colony‐level outcome distributions and a Bayesian hierarchical model for uncertainty quantification, while deriving spatial risk surfaces from N final ‐weighted kernel density estimation. In two southern coastal hubs, most colonies were large (>6000 workers), surpassed the energy viability threshold, produced high numbers of gynes (approaching the model cap of 350) and exhibited dispersal potential ≥40 km. By contrast, many inland and northern colonies fell below viability thresholds, indicating an extensive demographic sink habitat despite widespread detection. Queen production scaled steeply with final workforce size ( r ≈ 0.91), and dispersal covaried with reproductive output, explaining rapid macro‐scale diffusion from a minority of source colonies. Sensitivity analyses identified colony energy budgets and per capita metabolic demand as dominant drivers, with modest energetic shifts producing nonlinear changes in colony size, reproductive output and dispersal. Kernel‐weighted risk surfaces delineated a southern littoral corridor linking the two hubs and channeling further spread. CONCLUSION Management should prioritize detection and pre‐emergence removal of high‐output colonies in coastal and peri‐apiary landscapes, supported by surveillance buffers ≥40 km. Broad suppression in inland sink regions would provide limited benefit. The results of this study demonstrate that an energy‐aware framework complements climate‐only species distribution models and is transferable to assessments of other eusocial invaders governed by colony‐level resource economies. © 2026 Society of Chemical Industry.