"Bees' nest"?!!! WTF!!!

[Wilson Gray]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 11:07 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> a bee will die after it stings you because its stinger will be given up for the pleasure of the act and it can't live without its stinger, while a yellowjacket or other wasp can keep stinging you as long its little heart desires.

It's true, all right. A bee's stinger has barbs that keep it from
being withdrawn. So, when the bee flies off after delivering the
sting, the poor thing's guts are torn out and it dies of the injury.
Hence, bees sting only when the situation is do - or die, anyway.
Bee-venom "cures" merely kill a lot of bees for nothing. OTOH, wasps'
and hornets' stingers are smooth. So, a wasp or a hornet can sting you
until it's out of venom, merely because you're unknowingly standing in
its flight path back to the wasphive or the hornethive, and suffer no
ill effects. Unless you swat it, of course.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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