Jim wrote:
>Bee stings themselves have never killed anyone.
>What kills people is their own allergic reaction.
>The key question to be asked is about each individual's immune system, rather than about the venom.

Jim, perhaps I'm reading too much into your post, but I think that you may be confusing the venom reaction with the "true" allergic reaction.

Virtually 100% of the population will react to venom.  (The obvious exception being beekeepers who have acclimated themselves to a certain level of continuous exposure.)  Only a small percentage of the population are allergic to bees.  Those who are truly allergic:
1.  will react to any amount of venom in a reaction far out of proportion to the reaction of the rest of the population.
2.  will react to parts of the bee other than venom (legs, hairs, etc).

The fact that bee venom activates the histamin pathways in a non-allergic person does not make it an allergen to him/her.  People with allergies have fundamentally different reactions.  Current allergy research says they are not just the tail end of the bell curve.  The original question asking about the LD50 of bee stings (or bee venom) is a bell curve question targeting the mass of population and can be considered as independent of the biological pathways triggered by the venom (that is, the immune system).

All that said, I agree with you that most people who say they are "allergic" are not.  The extreme fear of bees would be funny if it weren't so sad.

By the way, I think the more probable reasons that honeybee venom has not been "picked up long ago by primitive peoples as an arrow-tip toxin" include:
1) Hugo's post showing that it would take a relatively large amount of venom, making it a weak toxin compared to others available,
2) that the toxin is inherently dangerous to collect (Toxic frogs and plants, for example, don't sting back and are comparatively safe to handle.) and
3) that honeybees are an import from Western Europe.  (If those cultures used honeybee venom as poison, it may be lost in the archeological record.  And other cultures already had sources of arrow-tip poisons before the honeybee became established in their area.)
4) good arrow-tip poisons also have to have adhesive qualities - it has to stay on the tip during preparation, handling, firing and even through the puncture of hide/skin.  Bee venom may not meet this critierion (I don't know it it's ever been tested).

Mike Rossander
(who has one life-threatening allergy and several lesser allergies but thankfully none to his bees)


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