The following was taken from _The_Lancet_, which is a
medical journal on the internet fount at:
http://www.thelancet.com
REMOVING BEE STINGS: SPEED MATTERS, METHOD DOESN'T (pp
301-02)
If you are stung by a bee, get the sting out of your skin as
quickly as possible, no matter how. That is the practical
message reached by two Californian scientists who describe
stinging themselves with bees in the interest of science in
The Lancet this week.
Kirk Visscher and Richard Vetter, who study insects at the
University of California, Riverside, questioned whether the
conventional advice to scrape the sting apparatus out the
skin, perhaps with a knife blade or credit card, is sound.
Or, they postulated, should you pinch the sting out with
fingers or forceps? "Volunteers me and me" was the order of
the day.
With a lucky (or wise) medical colleague, Scott Camazine
from Pennsylvania State University, as observer only,
Visscher and Vetter drew up their shirt sleeves and
"collected a worker honey bee as she flew from her hive,
grasped her by the wings, and pressed her against the skin"
until they were stung, twenty times in all in each
volunteer. Two seconds later, the stingers scraped the
sting off with a credit card or pinched it out with their
thumb and forefinger. Camazine measured the size of the
wealts that appeared ten minutes later. There was no
difference in the size of the weal after scraping or
pinching: means of 80 and 74 mm2, respectively.
Visscher did other self-experiments, involving a total of
fifty forearm stings. The sting was left in for between
half and eight seconds, and Camazine measured the wealts ten
minutes later. The mean weal size increased the longer the
sting was left in, from just over 60 to about 82 mm2, which
is why fast removal is a good idea.
Bee stings are painful and sometimes fatal. About 17 people
die each year in the USA after being stung by bees. When
the honey bee stings, the sting embeds in the skin along
with a venom sac, a nerve cell, some muscles, and the end of
the bee's abdomen. Barbs on the sting itself work deeper
into the flesh as the muscles contract. The contractions
also pump venom from the sac via a valve and piston. The
longer the sting is in, the more venom is released. Hence
the advice from the researchers to get the sting out as
quickly as possible.
Bees also release an alarm chemical when they sting that
attracts other bees to come and sting you. If you are stung
by an Africanized bee (a cross-breed noted for its
aggression, and sweeping northward in the Americas), the
researchers modify their advice. Run away fast, they say,
before worrying about removing any stings.
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