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How do I avoid being stung by bees?
[ By permission of Ken Morris ]
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Contrary to widespread opinion, bees do not go round looking for people to sting. Well, not in Australia anyway. The most common bee in Australia is the introduced European honeybee (Apis mellifera), referred to from now on as bee. (Australian native bees look like stretched houseflies and have no sting.)The female worker bee is the one you will see around your home and garden, she is mostly looking for nectar to take home and make into honey; in the process she pollinates your fruit, vegetables and flowers. Without bees, most garden and farm produce would cost a whole lot more, if you could get it at all! Bees do a lot more for us than supply us with honey and beeswax. During the early spring she may be a scout, house - hunting for an affordable new home for a swarm to move into, or in hot weather looking for some water for the hive's evaporative cooling system. In any case, she is definitely not looking for people to sting! Bees only sting in defence of themselves or their hive. They sting if you walk on them in bare feet when they are gathering water from your lawn, they sometimes get caught in your hair and think they are under attack, and they sting if you sit on them or swipe at them, but they do not attack without provocation. A major reason for this attitude is that stinging kills them. The recurved barbs on their sting lodge in the flesh and when the bee tries to get away she rips out the stinger and attached venom sacs and dies soon after. To avoid being stung simply leave the bees alone, resist the urge to swipe at them if they land on you, they are looking for water and you are probably the moistest thing around at the time. Do not linger around their hives, especially near the entrance. |
What
do I do if I am stung by a bee? |
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1. Walk, don't run, away from where you were when stung, the now dying bee which stung you and the detached sting are giving off pheremones which enrage bees, so any other bees in the immediate area will sting you too! They believe there must have been good reason for their mate to sting you, they don't know it was only because you stepped on her or swiped at her. The reason for not running is that sudden movements alarm bees and may trigger an attack.
2. Remove the sting. Do not pull it out by gripping it with your fingers as the venom sacs are still attached, and you will squeeze in a lot more venom than was injected in the first place. Slide the back of a knife, a comb or if necessary a fingernail along the skin to 'scrape' it out. Do this while you are walking away from where you were stung as the detached sting continues to pump venom for some time after it is detached from the bee; the sooner you remove it the less venom will be injected. The sting will probably cause a bit of pain for 10 minutes or so, and may be itchy for a day or two.
Watch this medical tip video about what to do if stung !
After a few years of beekeeping, I seem to have become desensitised to bee venom, and have very little reaction. People allergic to bee venom can become seriously ill and even die from a bee sting. I am not qualified to offer any advice to allergic persons other than to suggest immediate medical treatment. I believe some highly sensitised people carry a hypodermic syringe containing an appropriate dose of adrenalin. For the pain of bee stings, I carry a tube of Dermocaine in my bee box for anyone around me who is stung while I am working bees. It seems to work well, and can be bought over the counter at pharmacies. It is an anaesthetic and antiseptic cream. I am not qualified to recommend it, and I daresay lots of similar products work equally well, it is just the one that I use. Ask your pharmacist to recommend, or your doctor to prescribe, a product suitable for you.
Book Description This digital document is an article from Medical Update, published by Benjamin Franklin Literary & Medical Society, Inc. on October 1, 1996. The length of the article is 819 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The research of three American entomologists, reporting in the August 3 issue of the British medical journal Lancet, refutes the conventional wisdom espoused ever since a bee first deposited its stinger (or sting, as the experts call it) in an unfortunate human. As every medical textbook and first-aid manual logically advises, the sting should never be summarily extracted by grabbing hold of the accompanying entrails left behind by the luckless bee. Doing so would squeeze more venom out of the sac attached to the sting, thereby increasing the amount of venom in the wound. Instead, one should use a knife blade, fingernail, or even a credit card to gently scrape and tease the sting out of the skin. |
The Ken Morris theory of bee stings:
I have a theory about bee stings. Some colonies are more aggressive than others, and beekeepers do get stung periodically, after all we are tearing apart their homes and raiding their food stores! I have found that mental attitude seems to make a big difference. If I approach a hive that I know to be a bit aggressive, and am anxious about being stung, I nearly always am! Conversely, if I approach the same hive thinking that whether I get stung or not, I am going to do whatever I am there to do, I am usually not stung! The theory goes like this:- Bees sense fear/anxiety/indecision, call it what you will, and think " what is this person afraid of ? Is he/she afraid because he/she is about to do something awful to me or my community and is afraid of the consequences? Perhaps I'd better martyr myself in a pre-emptive strike! " If anyone out there in cyberspace wants to fund a study, I'm your man! (As soon as I work out how to persuade people who are afraid of bees to volunteer to be stung!)
© 1995-2008 Albert W. Needham