SCRAPE, don鈥檛 squeeze: that鈥檚 the usual advice for dealing with bee
stings. But when a bee strikes not everyone is cool enough to find a blade and
scrape the sting out of their skin. And that鈥檚 probably just as well, says an
American entomologist who has personally tested various extraction techniques.
After 70 bee stings, he concludes that it doesn鈥檛 matter how you do it, just do
it fast. Any delay, while panicking or searching for something to scrape the
sting out, increases the dose of venom.
鈥淚鈥檝e been sceptical of the conventional advice for a long time,鈥� says Kirk
Visscher at the University of California, Riverside. Squeezing should not
release more poison, he thought, because the sting uses a 鈥減iston鈥� to pump the
venom through a valve.
Visscher pressed bees against his forearm until they stung him, then waited
various lengths of time before removing the sting. In this week鈥檚 issue of
The Lancet, he reveals that it made no difference whether he scraped or
squeezed. But an 8-second delay increased the size of the weal by about 30 per
cent.
Advertisement