how do beestings work?
When a bee stings their stinger pierces the skin in order to inject the victim with venom. There’s a big of a misconception about honeybees only being able to sting once. When it comes to mammals which have much thicker skin, this is true because the stinger becomes lodged in the skin.
Bees unlike wasps or native bees, have barbed stingers that become caught in mammalian skin, which ripped out of the bee killing it.
When the stinger catches on the skin it rips out some of the internal organs of the bee and it’s this massive abdominal rupturethat kills it. The organs that get torn out are the venom sac and accompanying protractor and retractor muscles, which continue to pump venom for up to a minute. When a bee stings it’ll also release alarm pheromones, which will cause other bees to attack and it funnily enough smells like bananas.
This is why when you’ve been stung you want to get the stinger out as soon as you can, but you need to avoid just pinching and pulling it out because you’ll just squeeze all the venom into yourself regardless. To remove a stinger correctly you should use the flat surface of something like a card to scrape the stinger off.
Apitoxin or bee venom contains the toxin melittin which is the main protein component of the vemon that causes pain in vertebrates, as well as histamines and other amines that cause itching, swelling and pain. Bees venom is also acidic compared to other insect stings, all of which are different, so your reaction to a wasp sting (which are alkaline) can be very different to the bodies reaction to a bee sting.
These proteins affect the immune system which can trigger in some people a much more severe immune reaction therefore resulting in anaphylaxis. You’ll know if someone is going into anaphylaxic shock when the swelling starts to spread rapidly across the body, swelling of the throat and tongue, abdominal pain, vomiting, fainting and so on.
