Which Hurts More, a Honeybee
Sting or a Bumblebee
Sting?
Well, for as long as it took us busy BUG-People to update the BUG-Trivia Quiz, we managed to collect quite an assortment of interesting responses! (I know... it's the suspense...) Okay. Here are the results: Honeybee 49%, Bumblebee 49%, Other 2%. Honest. It was a tie! We have some interesting answers, too. Here's a sample:Go to the answers indexHoneybee folks:
B.P., 14, from La Sierra High School in Riverside, CA and A. & S., 15, from San Marcos School in Santa Barbara, CA all said: A honey bee sting. Bumble bees do not sting. (A.& S. gave us one of these :-} too.)
K.Y., 16, from Timberline Secondary School in Campbell River, BC said: A honey bee sting, because bumble bees bite, don't they ?
C., 12, from SMA in Chicago, IL said: A honeybee sting hurts more because it has a much longer style to get the nectar out of the plants (Don't think they use their stingers - sticking out of their abdomens - to get nectar... Good reasoning, though.)
H.S., 14, from Texas Elementary in Arkansas, TE said: A honeybee sting because they use their stingers to protect the queen. (It's good to think about adaptive significance. Good guess, H.S.!)
Bumblebee folks:
P.M., old, from Community College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas, NV and A.A., 14, from LCWM Middle School in Lake Crystal, MN both said: Bumblebees are larger, they have bigger stingers that would hurt more.
D., 8, from S Elementary School in MI said: A bumble bee sting...cause Bumble bees have sharper stingers. (interesting idea...)
K.B., 8, from Oakdale School in Rock Hill, SC and T.B., 31, from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, LA both said: bumblebee-larger with more poison and it leaves its stinger
Q., 12, from somewhere said: Bumble bee. We learnt it in science.
J.M., 69, from Dubbie High School in Humbolt, CA said: (in very authoritative fashion) That is a trick question. A honey bee sting contains sylophanotic poison in it and a bumblebee sting contains a less sever thyroxidle poison that doesn't hurt or swell as bad. But the Bumblebee sting is bigger and goes in deeper, so they are both the same. (Whew! Nice job, J.M.!)
Yeah! Now we're getting somewhere! Okay, we did have a couple of visitors tell us they had been stung by both Honeybees and Bumblebees and one of them definitely hurts more than the other. And some of us BUG-People have been stung by both, too! And we can't agree either.
Here's the answer according to BUGMAN: Honeybee stings have the potential to hurt a lot more than Bumblebee stings and they can be more dangerous, too. Here's why... Honeybees sacrifice themselves when they sting by losing their stingers. A Honeybee's sting is double-shafted and barbed. When she stings you (and if can only be a she since the stinger is a modified egg-laying organ. The queen lays all the eggs in a Honeybee nest.), she leaves the stinger and part of her former reproductive system behind. There are two globs of muscles and a sack of toxins. After the bee leaves, the muscles writhe with a life of their own, digging the stinger deeper into your skin. This also squeezes the sack of toxins and empty more into you! That hurts!
Bumblebees do not live within the same kind of structured social system as the honeybees. All of the females are reproductive. They cannot afford to commit suicide because they are all responsible for making more Bumblebees. So a Bumblebee will jab, squirt some toxin, and pull out. How bad the sting hurts depends more on how much time she has to sting than her size. Along the same lines, the most deadly spider in the world, the Australian Funnel Web Spider is relatively small compared to some of the tarantulas which are relatively harmless (Don't get us wrong, it's plenty big enough! Just not the biggest).
So, if a honeybee stings you - before you start screaming and crying - look at the place it stug you and see if the stinger is still there. If it is use your fingernail and just flick it out as fast as you can. If you do it right away, it'll come right out and not hurt nearly as much. Of course, if you're not a grownup then any time anything like that happens you always tell a grownup. Some of these things can get dangerous in cases of allergic reactions. Check how you are feeling over the next half hour to a few hours after the sting. If you start having trouble breathing or any unusual pain, get help!
Now the good news... Neither Honeybees nor Bumblebees want to sting you. It's literally a pain in their buts! They are bothered though by carbon dioxide. That's the gas we breathe out. So when you're out bee watching keep your hand over your mouth and nose. You can watch pretty closely when bees and wasps are working on flowers. It is incredible to see them work!