Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
February 22, 2020
Explaining studies published in scientific journals is an interesting part of my job. I work hard to get the facts right, but when I don’t I appreciate corrections.
In last week’s column about bees, I wrote that “a drone’s one job is to wait for his turn to mate with the queen and then die.”
A reader kindly pointed out that “drones in a hive do not mate with their mother. The drones go to a ‘congregation center’ to find queens from other hives to mate.”
This man regretted using the machete he was holding
in his left hand to swipe at a honeybee stinging his right arm.
The move added stitches to the sting.
Courtesy Craig Thomas
Oh, what a difference an article makes. Instead of “the queen” I should have written “a queen.” I stand corrected.
Another reader wrote that he and his wife have watched ghost crabs on Kauai’s Barking Sands Beach grab beached honeybees and carry them off, presumably for a meal. Another stinger-eater is Hawaii’s inch-long mole crab, a species that lives under the sand near waterlines. When a Portuguese man-of-war or box jellyfish washes in, the crab reaches up, reels in the tentacle and eats it.
Be kind to our little beach crabs. They provide efficient stinger removal services.
Four readers wrote to tell me that I was wrong in saying that the best way to remove a bee stinger is by pinching and yanking.
This time I stand by my statement. In a study published in The Lancet (bit.ly/2vzOzbY), two entomologists and a medical doctor scientifically disproved the popular belief that scraping off a stinger is better than pinching.
For a base line, the researchers injected themselves on the forearm with five doses of bee venom ranging from a tiny to a large amount, and measured the size of the red raised area for each dosage.
Later the scientists collected worker honeybees as they left the hive, held them by the wings and pressed each against the skin of valiant volunteers. Researchers removed the resulting stingers either by pinching and yanking or by scraping with a credit card, both at timed intervals, ranging from a half-second to eightseconds.
To eliminate bias, observers measuring the size of the resulting lesions didn’t know how the stinger was removed or how long it had been left in the skin.
The result: The red, raised wound increased in size the longer the stinger was in the skin, regardless of how it was removed. The scientists concluded that speed matters, methods don’t.
By taking time to look for a shell or a credit card, the sting gets worse. Nor are our readily available thumbnails any good. In the study, scraping caused the stinger to sometimes break off inside the victim’s flesh. So go ahead. Pinch and pull straightaway.
This well-designed bee sting removal study was published in a respected medical journal in 1996, yet few people, including doctors, know about it. Doctors do know, however, that when a bee stings your arm, you shouldn’t swat it with a machete.
Thank you, readers, for taking the time to write.