On a recent camping trip with Cub Scouts, the boys seemed to be very concerned about the bees. As their leader I feel an obligation to be able to answer their questions, so I need to get up to speed on the various stinging insects. There seems to be a lot of “folk knowledge” about this topic, so I’m looking for the straight dope.
I can identify a honey bee, but I don’t see many of them any more. There is something popularly called a “sweat bee” in this area, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen that term in print, so maybe its correct name is something else. How many types of bees, wasps, and hornets are there in the US?
One of the most popular questions is how many times a bee, wasp or hornet can sting. Which types of bees can sting only once, losing their stingers when they do? Which types retain their stingers and can sting multiple times? Do they all have different types of venom? If a person is allergic to one type of venom, will he be allergic to the others? Are there any types that have stingers but no venom?
Generally, bee stings are barbed and tend to remain lodged in human skin when they are used, tearing out the poison sac from the bee and resuling in its eventual death. Wasps (including hornets) generally have smooth stingers and they can sting humans multiple times without harming themselves.
Part of the reason for this is that bee stings are defensive weapons; primarily used to fend off animals that threaten the nest, whereas wasp stings are used as defensive weapons and to subdue prey such as caterpillars and other insects on a regular basis; bees don’t need to be able to do this because they are not predatory.
Additionally, when the poison sac is torn out from the insect, and it stays attached to the barb that holds it into the stung subject, it continues to be a source of the toxin, which explains why it helps if you can find a way to get rid of the stinger if you can. The stinger carries more toxin. Sometimes, you can even see the little sac attached to it. A good sting can hurt and/or itch for several days if enough toxin is inserted, so you even have to be careful of how you try to get the stinger out. People try to do it in such a way that you put the pressure outward, away from the skin, being sure not to push any more pressure than necessary on the stinger, so that you don’t inadvertently pump more poison into the wound. Not easy, but that’s the idea.
Bumblebee stingers are not barbed, so they can sting more than once.
It’s true that wasps use their stings for predation, and that bees (which are not predators) don’t. This only partly explains why bees have barbed stingers.
A honeybee colony has only one fertile member (the queen). The other members of the colony are sterile, and are also all sisters (that is, all female offspring of the single queen). Although most of the bees in the hive can’t directly pass on their own genes, they can help the queen pass hers on. Since the workers have many of the same genes as the queen, by helping the queen reproduce they help genes identical to their own survive into future generations.
Under this system, it makes sense for the workers to defend the hive so vigorously that it results in their own deaths. On the other hand, even wasps that live in colonies don’t have queens - each wasp can reproduce, and isn’t as closely related to the other wasps in the colony as bees in a hive are to each other. In this case, it wouldn’t make sense for a wasp to “commit suicide” in defending the colony.