DEATH AND BEES
Most people who have found this blog through search engines recently have been looking for various variations of Mohammad caricatures and Nerikes Allehanda. However, today I had a visitor who searched for, and I quote, “DEATH AND BEES”. Since I don’t want to disappoint anyone, here’s some information about death and bees.
Normal people have nothing to fear from bee-stings. They hurt like hell for a while, you swell a bit and then there’s the goddamned itchiness to deal with for days. Bee venom is a carefully composed cocktail of peptide snippets designed to annoy the hell out of anyone who gets stung, teaching you to stay the frack away from bee colonies. Of course, these days, most beekeepers (at least in Sweden) keep bees who really could care less about humans. The only times you get stung is when you yourself make a mistake, such as squashing a bee or kicking over a hive. Even then, you have the satisfaction of knowing that most of the bees that sting you die a horrible death of having their insides torn apart as their stinger sticks in your skin.
Now, if you are truly allergic, instead of a mildly (or incredibly, in some cases, such as mine) annoying local reaction, you will suffer anaphylaxis. If you’re not prepared, this leads to death, which can happen within half an hour. Anaphylactic shocks are so dangerous they always go first in emergency wards - wait a few minutes too long and you’re dead. Essentially, what happens is that your body reacts way more than it ought to to the venom, and ends up shutting itself down. If you don’t choke to death as your throat swells, eventually you die anyway as your heart simply stops beating. Taking a cortisone pill may help give you a little extra time, but what you really need is a shot of adrenaline.
Now that you’re sufficiently freaked out I guess I ought to tell you that this only happens to a few people and most of those are beekeepers. Most other people never get any bee-stings at all. But if you get a sting and you start feeling lightheaded and nauseous, your armpits, groin, palms and the soles of your feet start itching, then the whole torso, and if your throat starts to feel swollen - that’s when you find someone to drive you to the hospital, pronto.
Of course, non-allergic people can also die of bee-stings if they have the misfortune of blundering into a lot of really angry bees (such as the africanised variety). If you get ten stings inside your throat, it really doesn’t matter how desensitised you are to bee-stings because you’re going to swell and choke anyway…
All in all, death by bee-sting is very rare. A quick google only gave me one statistic: In Australia during the years 1960-1981, only 27 people died from bee-stings. That’s hardly anything.
