It’s been nice and sunny round here recently so I’ve been spending a good amount of time in the garden with the family.
After chasing young master Delicious around for a few hours, I plop down on the grass and feel a sharp jab in my hand…I just almost squished a bee and she defended herself.
But then that was it, no ongoing pain or swelling. I realised I’ve not been stung by a bee since I was a child so I’ve no idea how much a bee sting should hurt
Are they normally extremely mild? Could this bee have stung someone else recently and used up all it’s venom? Or just decided not to go all out?
I thought bees were only meant to get one sting then their insides get ripped out, is that only one kind of bee?
And it was definitely a bee not a wasp, it was furry.
Honey bee stings don’t hurt very much.
I’ve been stung multiple times by “Killer Bees,” and the individual stings just feel like a tiny prick, but en mass, they start to hurt quite a bit, and they really itch when healing.
Honey bees generally get torn apart when they try to disengage after stinging you. But like anything else in life, I suppose this isn’t guaranteed. Just as some people are born with disabilities, it’s not hard to imagine that there might be honeybees with underdeveloped venom glands and/or malformed stingers. Maybe you got lucky.
Other types of stinging insects (including other types of bees and wasps) generally don’t get torn apart the same way.
As for the pain, not all stings are created equal. I got stung by a bumblebee a few years back, and it wasn’t bad. I got stung by a yellowjacket when I was 18, and it hurt very, very much; it left me highly motivated to avoid a repeat.
I’ve only been stung once by a bee, so far as I know, and it wasn’t that bad, either. Just a quick pin prick, and then some swelling a few minutes later. Felt like a big mosquito more than anything else.
I got stung by a bumblebee once - in the armpit of all places - and it was more freaky than painful. How did a decent sized bee get inside my clothes without me noticing?
I got stung more than a dozen times in one go by wasps. I was very shaky for a short time afterwards - whether that was venom or fright I don’t know. But it wasn’t particularly painful, although some of the sting sites got annoyingly itchy.
A horsefly (what we call cleggs locally) bite on the other hand was a) painful right away and b) a very painful big boil of infection and pus in fairly short order. The scar is still visible decades later. Horrid things.
I got stung by one of those big yellow ones a few years back and it hurt like hell. Most bee stings I have had were moderately painful with some numbness and soreness that lingered for a while.
You may be one of those that don’t experience that particular sting as painful. I recall a wasp sting as very painful, my wife not so much but she finds stinging nettles very painful whereas I just a get a mild itchy tingling that really doesn’t bother me too much. I also react very badly to the mosquitoes in my corner of SE England and she gets a small itchy bump.
People are weird but then that’s Darwin in action for you I suppose.
Probably wasn’t a honey bee- people have this idea that there’s honey bees and bumble bees and that’s about it, but there are over 4000 species of bees in the US, some of which look pretty similar to Apis mellifera, the honey bee.
Some don’t sting at all, some do but don’t have barbed stings so they don’t die after stinging. Queen honey bees actually don’t have barbed stings either, so they can sting without dying, but it’s pretty unlikely that you got stung by one of them. Especially as it was in the grass, probably some kind of solitary bee.
Regarding honey bees, the venom effects tend to change seasonally, as venom potency increases as the bee ages. You don’t want to get stung in late winter by a bee that’s overwintered, it’s way more painful than this time of year, when they’re all young spring bees and the venom isn’t as bad. It also depends on how much venom they manage to get in. The sting sticks in your skin and carries on pumping venom after detaching from the bee, so if you do get stung by a honey bee, carefully remove the sting asap (without squishing the bag of venom) and you’ll get less venom and a noticeably lower reaction.
I keep bees, so I get stung fairly often. The reaction I get varies substantially; sometimes virtually nothing, sometimes pain and swelling.
Is that really a given? My gf has been talking/researching about setting up a few hives. She gives me the impression there will be no stinging.
I asked an electrician once if he ever got zapped. He told me it was a near daily experience. I asked another electrician the same question and he told me he’d never been shocked after thirty years working.
People react quite differently to bee stings. I generally have extremely harsh reactions, having gone into anaphylactic shock twice as a child, then getting two years of bee sting venom treatment to build up my tolerance. I still react more than most people - intense pain, localized swelling, systemic itching - but I no longer stop breathing so I consider it a win.
But if you haven’t had a bee sting since childhood your body may simply not react strongly right now. Unfortunately, my experience has been that the more you get stung, the more likely your body will generate a more severe reaction.
I’d say you would get stung sooner or later. I’ve certainly not met a beekeeper who’s never been stung. Some just a few times, some all the time.
If you get good-natured bees, it can be rare, I went nearly 6 months before the first sting, but it’s more like dealing with electricity that suddenly decides it can jump gaps every now and again; sometimes they manage to sting through a bee suit, though that’s not happened to me yet.
They can have sudden mood swings depending on stuff like weather, scents and other insects robbing the colony, and it takes a while to really learn to read the behaviour, and they can always catch you out.
I also don’t wear thick gloves, as I’m so clumsy in them it agitates the bees, so I get stung through my washing-up gloves sometimes. I don’t react badly, so I just don’t worry too much about the odd sting.
