Way out west

Nevada folk call wasps (yellow jackets) meat bees, presumably because they see them eating grasshoppers and insects.

One local stung on his scalp described it as being like having a cattle prod on the head. I suspect all beekeepers can relate to that.

Hornet in bonnet?

Lady Masson, a British peer of the realm, has set a hare -- or a hornet -- running by raising the issue of increasing number of hornets in the UK.

A relative of a friend of hers was unfortunate enough to have stood on one as he got out of the bath, was stung and died from anaphylactic shock. She wants more research -- into precisiely what I'm not sure. If it's into treatment and diagnosis of anaphylaxis generally, I'm all for it. If it's about the increase in hornets, I think there are more pressing issues.

Here's an audio interview from the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: go to the 8am slot, 20 minutes in.

As the insect expert said, it's unlikley that anyone else has been killed by a hornet in the UK for the past ten or 15 years.

Elephant scarer

Elephants will turn tail (and trunk) if they hear the buzz of bees say Oxford University researchers trying to find a way of keeping them away from villages. They set up recordings of buzzing and, for the moment, they are effective as elephant scarers, but they fear that elephants may soon understand the con.

It's not just the elephants that are smart, the bees are no dummies either -- they sting elephants inside their trunks.

Stinging chestnuts

I've just come across an old (1994) Time article about President Viktor Yushchenko of the Ukraine. It has an odd opening paragraph:

The first thing one notices about the opposition candidate is his face, full of scars and blisters that were absent from his once youthful, handsome visage just six months ago. And though Viktor Yushchenko, 50, raises bees in his spare time, he and his supporters from western Ukraine claim that there is nothing natural about his disfigurement, which they say is the result of a poisoning attempt by his political rivals in September.

Now you'll excuse my ignorance but does the author (Daniel Eisenberg) really think that bees might have anything to do with his appearance?

Daniel seems to suffer from that old chestnut of the fixation of non-beekeepers on stinging. I bet if he interviewed Viktor one of his top questions would be: Do you get stung?

How bad is a bee sting?

How does a bee sting rate on the pain threshold? Now we have the Schmidt Pain Sting Index. He rates it as a two on the one to four scale: worse than a fire ant at one, but less than the harvester ant and tarantula hawk at three and four respectively. Apparently a bee sting can cause you to vocalise. Me? Oh, never!

Apparently, we can thank Justin O Schmidt for helping restrain the Killer Bee stories -- or as I now learn we can call them: pollen pigs! He worked for the US Department of Agriculture where he once worked at the Tucson Carl Hayden Bee Research Center.