- [Narrator] Have you ever
been stung by a honeybee? Man, it's the worst! It burns for hours and then swells up, leaving a big red welt for days. But as bad as it feels, it's actually the bee that
gets the raw end of this deal, because a few minutes after
it's stung you, it dies. Wait, why would an animal
have a self-defense mechanism that's more deadly to it than
the thing it's attacking? That doesn't make sense! Well, there's actually a lot more to this kamikaze defense
mechanism than meets the eye. So put on some thick
gloves and get ice ready, because we're about to
take a pretty painful look into the secrets of bee stings. (upbeat music) Step-By-Step Sting. You might not want to admit it, but if you've ever been stung by a bee, it was probably your fault. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but, in general, bees only sting humans if we approach their
hives or threaten them with aggressive or reckless behavior. If a bee is hunting for pollen, they'll leave us alone unless we handle them
roughly or step on them. Now, you may have heard that
all bees die after stinging. Well, actually, only the honeybee does. When any bee stings you, it simply inserts its
stinger into your skin. In the case of honeybees, however, their stinger is made
of two barbed lancets, giving it rougher edges
that can act as tiny hooks. Because of these lancets, when a honeybee inserts
its stinger into the skin, it can't pull the stinger back out, and that doesn't stop the
honeybee from trying though. The second they try to take off, not only is their stinger pulled out, but the muscles, nerves and parts of their
digestive system attached to it are torn out of
their backside as well. It's a nasty way to go if you ask me. But there is an even more
tragic element to it. When honeybees sting insects, as they often do when bugs
try to attack the hive, they can remove their stingers just fine. It's all down to the amount of fiber in the animal's skin that
causes the stinger to lodge. Those barbed lancets are designed to dig in as deeply as possible, and when it comes to a
mammal's fibrous skin, there's no removing that
stinger without ripping it out. So those poor honeybees have no idea that when they sting us, the
impact will kill them. But back to us humans! What impact does a bee sting
really have on our skin? Well, bee stings inject a
venomous toxin called melittin, which gives the sting its painful effect. And if you're allergic to bee stings, it's actually its melittin
that you're allergic to. The toxin causes redness and swelling at the site of the attack and since bee venom dissolves in water, it's able to spread around
the human body with ease. If you weren't aware, 60% of the human body is water, so there's a lot of spreading to be done. Now, if you are ever stung by a honeybee, you must remember to remove
the stinger immediately. Alongside those muscles and nerves, the pulsating sacks of melittin the honeybee leaves behind will continue to pump venom into the
skin until they're removed. So you better pick them
out as soon as possible. The longer it's in there, the more melittin is injected, and the itchier and more
swollen the area will get, as this poor guy found out
when a bee stung his tongue. Ugh, I'm reaching for the
ice just thinking about it. Sounds painful, but you know
what literally can't hurt? Hitting those like and
subscribe buttons down below. All done? Great. Now, we've seen how
honeybees meet their fate, but why do they decide to sting, and how do they deal with
butt-dwelling parasites like this? Well, stick with me to find out. (picture whooshing) Stingless Bees. Now, to anyone terrified of bees, what I'm about to say
might sound like a joke. A lot of bees are
actually unable to sting. That's right, all male
bees and many female bees from different bee families
simply cannot sting. In fact, the Andrenidae
are an entire family of bees whose stingers are
so drastically reduced, they couldn't sting you if they wanted to. There's also another group of
bees called the Meliponini, also known, literally, as stingless bees. These tend to be found
in subtropical regions, like Australia, Africa, Southeast Asia and parts of Brazil and Mexico. In fact, most bees in Central and South America are stingless. So if you really, really hate bee stings, now you know where to head on vacation. So without a usable stinger, how do stingless bees defend themselves? Well, like many other
insects, they bite instead. However, just like their stinging cousins, these bees use their bite to cling on to their enemy to the death, either theirs or the enemy's. So they're just as self-sacrificial as those bees with stingers. On second thought, I take back what I said about ideal vacation destinations. Nowhere is safe. Like regular bees, stingless
hives have been known to consist of anywhere between
3,000 to 80,000 workers. That being said, only a small number of stingless bee species
produce enough honey to be farmed by humans, but that doesn't mean we
haven't found use for them. Because of their
relatively harmless nature, many people, especially in Brazil, choose to keep stingless bees as pets. So if you're looking for a pet but don't fancy any of
the traditional options, a stingless bee colony might
be what you're looking for. It won't require walking, you wouldn't have to pick up its poop, and you could get a little
free honey at the end of it. Suddenly my dog is looking
like a bit of a bum investment. (picture whooshing) The Stinging Scheme. Bringing it back to bees that can sting, have you ever wondered how a bee makes the decision to use its stinger? Well, to answer that question, we first have to understand pheromones. A pheromone is a chemical or a mixture of chemicals released by an organism that affects the behavior of other members of the same species. So, it's information communicated mainly by an organism's sense of smell. The idea that there are
chemical messages floating around us all the time
may sound a bit crazy, but pheromone signaling
like this is essential to a bee's survival. For example, a primer pheromone
causes long-term changes in the physiology and behavior of a bee. Yep, a chemical signal
alone can literally alter a bee's body during development. Woah! But a releaser pheromone causes
a rapid change in behavior. So alarm pheromones, which are a type of releaser pheromones, are emitted immediately
after a bee stings something. This alerts other bees to something like a threat entering the hive, instructing all those that can sense the pheromone to attack the intruder. But when do they know how to stop? Well, a team of researchers from the Universities of Constance and Innsbruck helped answer
this question in 2021. They found that bees base their decisions about whether to sting or
not based almost solely on the amount of this alarm
pheromone in the atmosphere. In addition to this, they learned bees hold
two internal thresholds that measure the pheromone's level: one that tells them when to begin stinging and one that tells them when to stop. Almost like an internal
thermometer but for violence! These pheromones can also
help the bees determine the extent of the threat they face, with more pheromones in the
air indicating more danger. As such, the bees work out
the level of danger via the level of alarm
pheromone in the atmosphere. So the more an intruder is stung, the more bees come to fight it off. Considering a single colony can consist of more than 100,000 bees, that's one fight you definitely don't want to be on the wrong side of. (picture whooshing) Killer Bees. Back in 2019, it was estimated that your odds of kicking the bucket because of an allergic reaction to a bee sting was just one in 59,507 or 0.00168%. Phew, most of us can breathe easy. Except, those are your odds if you're faced with regular honeybees. Your odds of surviving
dramatically decrease if you're faced with the Africanized bees of North and South America. These are bees that were taken to Brazil in 1956 by scientists attempting to develop a honeybee better
suited to a tropical climate. The African bees were
placed in quarantine, but 26 queens broke out. The queens then began breeding
with native Brazilian bees, resulting in a species
of ultra-aggressive, ultra-lethal mutant bees who have formed hives
all across the Americas. Now, tell me that's not the best villain origin
story you've ever heard. These Africanized bees are very defensive and will fight back with all guns blazing or, more accurately, all stingers stinging at even the smallest provocation. I'm not joking. This species have fatally
injured more than 1,000 people, with victims found with
10 times more stings than European bees. Not only that, they've
been known to chase people for up to a quarter of a mile. Now, this scarily high death rate isn't because Africanized bees have a more venomous sting than others. It's that they attack in huge numbers, with reports of swarms reaching
a terrifying 800,000 bees. I suppose the only question now is, how many stings a person can withstand before the worst happens? Well, the average person can
tolerate around 10 stings for each pound of their body weight. That means, discounting
an allergic reaction, the average adult human can
withstand roughly 1,000 stings, whereas a child can
only tolerate up to 500. So versus 800,000 angry Africanized bees, less than 0.2% of the
swarm would be enough to end you! Well, I don't know about you, but I'm going to work on my ability to run a quarter of a mile fast. (picture whooshing) Wasp's the Difference? Now, we couldn't do a video about bees, nature's honey givers, without mentioning wasps,
nature's (duck quacks) Unlike a bee's, wasp
stingers aren't barbed, meaning they can be used over and over without risk of the creature
dying unfortunately. But while their stings
might feel the same, wasp stings are actually made up of a completely different set of toxins. One way to measure this
is on the PH scale, which ranks a substance from zero to 14 depending on how acidic it is. A zero on the PH scale is purely
acidic, like battery acid, and a 14 is entirely
alkaline, like drain cleaner. So, as another example, water is a seven on the PH
scale, right in the middle, because it is neither acidic nor alkaline and is therefore classed as neutral. So where do bee and wasp
stings land on the PH scale? Well, with a score of between 4.5 and 5.5, bee stings veer towards
being slightly acidic while, with a score of
between 6.8 and 6.9, wasp stings are ever so
slightly more alkaline. That means bee stings are about as acidic as tomato juice and beer, while wasp stings are about as alkaline as saliva, milk, and urine. Ugh, given those two comparisons, I'd much rather be stung by a bee. The PH scale not only demonstrates how different bee and wasp stings are but also why humans have
distinct reactions to them. While there are many similarities in the body's reaction to toxins, you might be surprised to discover that people who are allergic to bee stings are not necessarily
allergic to wasp stings. And it's the same the
other way round, of course. But still, while you're
discussing wasp and bee stings, make sure you know wasp's the difference! But this is all without mentioning the bee's other (duck
quacks) cousin, the hornet. Now, technically, hornets
are a specific type of wasp, but they are so much larger
than the average wasp, they've earned their own
classification and reputation. Hornets are generally a
little friendlier than wasps but when they do get aggressive, their stings are far more painful because their venom contains a
high amount of acetylcholine, a powerful pain stimulant, as if they've been designed by Satan himself just to deliver pain. However, they're not
immune to pain themselves. Standard hornets can grow
up to two inches in size, which makes them big enough to be infected by Xenos moutoni, parasites that live
inside the hornet's body. The Xenos parasite causes the hornet to drastically alter its behavior, flying to meet other infected hornets so the Xenos parasites can mate. The male parasite exits its host hornet and crawls into a hornet
hosting a female parasite. As such, hornets infected with
the male parasite will die. When they're removed, the parasites can look like the most dangerous stingers
in the insect kingdom, but mercifully, they're more of a danger to the hornets than they are to humans. (picture whooshing) Sting Spawners. Now, I've been calling them stingers, but the scientific name for the pointy end of a bee is actually the ovipositor. And, believe it or not, they're intended to do more than just deliver a painful prick. So, what is an ovipositor?
Ah good question, me. Well, an ovipositor is
a tube-like organ used by some female organisms,
insects in particular, to help maneuver its eggs. As such, ovipositors are designed to prepare space for an egg, and then transmit it before
attaching it to a surface. So the so-called stingers of bees, as well as wasps, hornets, and ants, are really ovipositors. Except, because they've been
utilized for another purpose, they're what we call modified ovipositors. In the case of bee stingers, the ovipositors are modified with the venom glands we
saw in action earlier. For their part, queen bees, who are the lone reproducers within the colony in most cases, do not have the same ovipositors
as your average worker bee. The ovipositor on a queen bee is smaller, smoother, and un-barbed, making it more adept at laying eggs, something the queen definitely needs, seeing as, at their peak, a healthy queen can lay
up to 3,000 eggs a day. But when a queen meets another queen, the ovipositor is used as a stinger and a fight to the death
ensues, highlander style, because there can be only one. For their part, worker bees
can use their ovipositors for their traditional purpose. If a hive becomes queen-less, the pheromones the queen releases to stop ovary development in
other female bees is ceased. This means, without the queen, the bee's bodies develop the
organs they need to reproduce. However, if by some freak
accident a worker bee tries to lay eggs while the
queen is still alive, a conflict would ensue. Looks like there's only room
in the hive for one queen bee. (picture whooshing) Elephant Enemies. You may have heard that elephants are hilariously afraid of mice. Well, the jury is still out on whether that's true or not, but there is another animal that definitely haunts
an elephant's nightmares. And can you guess which one? Yep, elephants are terrified of bees. As unbelievable as it sounds, the largest land animal
in the world reacts wildly to these teeny tiny insects. You see, while human skin
is penetrable to bees, elephant skin is too tough
to even make a dent in. What bees can do is attack the more sensitive parts of an elephant, like its trunk, mouth, and eyes, in massive swarms, causing it great pain. Now, elephants are so large that they generally have
no natural predators, so they're not used to this
sort of terrifying invasion. So much so that conservationists
actually use this fear as a means of protecting the elephants from poachers and farmers. Researchers and advocates now recommend that farmers boarder their farms with beehives to keep the
elephants off their land, and this works in a whopping 80% of cases. There's just one catch: the
farmers have to use real bees. Despite their irrational fear, elephants have the largest
brains of any land animal, containing as many neurons
as the human brain. This means they're smart
enough to tell the difference between an empty beehive
and an active one. In some cases, where just the sound of buzzing bees were played from the hive, the elephants managed to quickly establish that the threat was not real. Now those are some Jumbo smarts. (picture whooshing) Bee Therapy. You'd think after all we learned that most people would get as far away from a bee sting as possible. Well, if that's your take, then you're in for a surprise, because some people
think it's good for them. I'm talking about apitherapy, otherwise known as bee venom therapy, which is the name for medical
treatments administered through bee stings. Therapy with bee venom
can involve receiving up to 40 stings in a single session. Ice is used throughout to
numb the skin and reduce pain. The rationale behind apitherapy is that bee stings cause inflammation and therefore trigger an
anti-inflammatory response in the body. This could potentially benefit people with muscular conditions like MS. But other people just like it because wherever there's a crazy health fad, there's a group of even crazier people undergoing the treatment. In 2005, a clinical trial compared people with MS who received bee
venom therapy every week with those who received no treatment. After 24 weeks measuring elements like fatigue and quality of
life, the results were in. And drumroll please,
(drum music) absolutely no difference was
found between the two groups. Well, thank god no one's
told Gwyneth Paltrow about this yet. Who knew there was so much
behind one little bee sting. Have you ever been stung yourself, or do you have any
incredible tales stemming from a single sting? Let me know down in the comments below, and thanks for watching. (lively music)
