I got stung once by a hornet in a pub garden having lunch with my family. It was hovering around the flowers in the hanging baskets and it set its sights on my burger. Pesky flying nuisance. It got me on my wrist and it swelled up like a balloon but I don’t remember it hurting very much. I think I had to have my wrist lanced as it looked like a blimp and was about to explode.
I once had a wasps nest in my loft. I kept finding dead wasps on the window sills all over the house and couldn’t work out why. It was like a scene from The Exorcist. I went up to the loft weeks later to fetch something and there was a nest as big as me built on the far wall and swarms of the buggers everywhere. I closed down the hatch, called the exterminator and he vacuumed up two huge bags of dead wasps when he’d finished fumigating them. Horrible things. They chew your fence too.
I spent three weeks on a bear study project in North Carolina and got stung by yellow jackets 17 times. Apart from that maybe 5 or 6 times total in my 54 years.
Six times. Once by a honeybee as a kid, once by a wasp that had gotten into my shirt before I put it on. (I was pulling on the shirt and literally thinking “where did that wasp go?” when I got stung.) Four times by bumble bees, thrice by the same bumblebee. (Bumblebees don’t die when they sting you.)
I’ve been stung once, which is sort of amazing. I grew up in rural KY and as kids we were constantly screwing around with stinging insects. We used to try and catch yellow jackets and bees in jars, and I vividly remember a bunch of us throwing rocks and sticks at a hornet’s nest until it hit the ground and broke open, sending us running. We used to collect empty bottles and wasps were always hanging around those because of the sugar.
But I wasn’t stung until I was an adult - I felt something crawling on my neck and slapped it, turned out to be a wasp and stung like heck. as it died That was over 30 years ago.
We used to accidentally step on yellow jacket nests at girl scout camp. Escape sometimes involved running and jumping in creeks. (We also had to worry about rattlers at camp, but I don’t recall anyone ever being bitten although we had to take snakebite first aid.)
I’ve been stung by a few bees and at least one hornet, which didn’t hurt much. I also came close to sitting on a cowkiller while viewing the eclipse. I’m sure I would have noticed if I had.
What the heck is a cowkiller? I have lived in the deep South for many years, in the boonies, I have never heard that term. And BTW I stepped on a wasp today on my porch. They are moving slow because it cooled off a bit, so it didn’t sting my bare foot!
A Cowkiller is also know as a Velvet Ant, and is a flightless wasp with a fierce sting. They look like large, fuzzy read-and-black ants, and are supposed to be at least a 3/4 on the Schmidt pain index.
The worst I remember was going down the basement steps, I put my hand on a wasp on the handrail. I immediately went to my car and got out my snakebite kit and applied the suction cup to the sting, and within seconds, I felt complete relief, and never a bit of discomfort after that.
The last time was last year in Surinam, when I swatted some kind of insect and rubbed the stinger in, but it was minor and the slight stinging went away within a half hour. I always carry benadryl when I travel, just in case, but I’ve never needed it. But I did give some once to a traveling companion who was stung. It really works, and if you went to a doctor, that’s what he’d give you.
Once by a bee. I knelt on it in the grass. Not that painful. I have asthma and lots of allergies, so I was afraid of a severe reaction, but I had no reaction beyond the sting itself.
Once by a wasp. Painful, but not as painful as the antibiotic injections in the buttocks I’d get when I had bronchitis as a kid.
I was also bitten once by some very large fly (maybe a horsefly).
I was 5 going up the ladder of the big metal slide (remember those?) at our local park the first time a [honey] bee flew up and tagged me for no gawddamned reason!
It just got worse. Yellow jacket got into my cleat when I played football in middle school and stung me on the ankle multiple times. I ran around our side of the field screaming like a banshee.
I get stung almost every summer working in my yard. Why are bees attracted to the heat of the lawn mower engine? I opened a thread on this once and got no replies.
Was standing line once to use the diving board at a local pool. I actually watched a wasp fly across the pool from 30 yards away and right to my thigh where it zapped me. WHY? :mad: