You bug me.

[wickstad]

So I've been in the Northwest my entire life. Ancestors decided to come here and I see no reason to leave.

Apparently there is some science? concerning bugs that bite and sting. Of course there are folks who are allergic to bee stings which is a real concern. My question is what is the most pain you have felt from an insect sting or bite. Mine is easy. Horsefly bite on the upper Skykomish River. This in comparison in order to a bumblebee sting, honey bee sting and hornet (yellow jackets) that are so tenacious that I was still being stung about a half mile from the nest.

Please let me know your experiences.

[Flyoverland Captive]

Bald Faced Hornet. Fuck those things hurt; swollen and burning for two days.

Yellowjackets and wasps are bad, but they got nothin' on baldies. And I used to keep honeybees; they feel like a big mosquito. So gentle.

[Meadow Skipper]

Are scorpions bugs?

Spiders are, probably. Horseflies got nothin' on them.

[wickstad]

Are scorpions bugs?

Spiders are, probably. Horseflies got nothin' on them.

That is intersting. They are not included in the Schmidt study but I thinkthat I would include them. Bald faced hornet is and scores very high.

[Tippster]

Are scorpions bugs?

Spiders are, probably. Horseflies got nothin' on them.

If spiders are "bugs" then scorpions are too.

[iceman]

I got bitten by some kind of a badass spider and that is still among the top 10 most painful things I've felt in my life. Whole arm was swollen and red, just on fire. Filled a big pan with icewater and soaked it until my arm was both insanely painful and also numb from cold. That was pretty crazy.

On a side note, there is something wrong with the human pain response. Pain is supposed to warn you to stop doing something and to take care of it, it doesn't seem that there would be any evolutionary advantage conferred by having a pain response that has no upper limit and which at the higher end of the scale can actually stop you from doing anything to help yourself. So fuck you mother nature.

[char]

Bald Faced Hornet. Fuck those things hurt; swollen and burning for two days.

Yellowjackets and wasps are bad, but they got nothin' on baldies.

This.

[MakersTeleMark]

On a side note, there is something wrong with the human pain response. Pain is supposed to warn you to stop doing something and to take care of it, it doesn't seem that there would be any evolutionary advantage conferred by having a pain response that has no upper limit and which at the higher end of the scale can actually stop you from doing anything to help yourself. So fuck you mother nature.

Like women?

[mogul5480]

I have mostly been stung by the usual yellow jackets and paper wasps growing up back east. Sucked as a kid but not noteworthy. As an aside though, a tarantula hawk buzzed by me in my back yard last week and scared the bejeebus out of me. Those things are absolutely terrifying to look at (also the highest rated on the Schmidt index of any flying hymnopteran in the world - it's basically a flying bullet ant and the east bay has got em).

[farmer]

Horse flies and yellow jackets are my worst. Not that bad.

On the other hand, our superintendent put his boot on a few weeks ago, and felt something in there, but didn't think much of it. Thought it was a rock or some dirt or some me thing of that nature. Within an hour or so (while underground) he started feeling funny, and noticed the pain in his foot. Gets back out to the surface, takes his boot off, and a god damned 4" scorpion crawls out, still alive. He felt pretty screwed up for a couple days.

[LegoSkier]

I got nothing personal to add to this thread but just wanted to share this tidbit from the bullet ant Wikipedia page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_ant

Initiation rites
The Satere-Mawe people of Brazil use intentional bullet ant stings as part of their initiation rites to become a warrior.[7] The ants are first rendered unconscious by submerging them in a natural sedative, and then hundreds of them are woven into a glove made of leaves (which resembles a large oven mitt), stingers facing inward. When the ants regain consciousness, a boy slips the glove onto his hand. The goal of this initiation rite is to keep the glove on for a full 10 minutes. When finished, the boy's hand and part of his arm are temporarily paralyzed because of the ant venom, and he may shake uncontrollably for days. The only "protection" provided is a coating of charcoal on the hands, supposedly to confuse the ants and inhibit their stinging. To fully complete the initiation, however, the boys must go through the ordeal a total of 20 times over the course of several months or even years.[8]

Fuck that. I'd rather run away and become a male prostitute in some backwater shithole amazon mining town than go through that initiation.

[sb]

I here those millipeed fkrs have a nasty chomp.

[sb]

I got nothing personal to add to this thread but just wanted to share this tidbit from the bullet ant Wikipedia page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_ant

Initiation rites
The Satere-Mawe people of Brazil use intentional bullet ant stings as part of their initiation rites to become a warrior.[7] The ants are first rendered unconscious by submerging them in a natural sedative, and then hundreds of them are woven into a glove made of leaves (which resembles a large oven mitt), stingers facing inward. When the ants regain consciousness, a boy slips the glove onto his hand. The goal of this initiation rite is to keep the glove on for a full 10 minutes. When finished, the boy's hand and part of his arm are temporarily paralyzed because of the ant venom, and he may shake uncontrollably for days. The only "protection" provided is a coating of charcoal on the hands, supposedly to confuse the ants and inhibit their stinging. To fully complete the initiation, however, the boys must go through the ordeal a total of 20 times over the course of several months or even years.[8]

Fuck that. I'd rather run away and become a male prostitute in some backwater shithole amazon mining town than go through that initiation.

There is a wildboyz vid on that one.

[bagtagley]

Bald faced hornet got my lower leg and ankle three times on a long trail run. Hurt like a son of a bitch. By the end of the run, my ankle was swollen. The next day, My whole ankle and up my leg were swollen and purple, and the area around the two worst stings was blue/black and hard as a rock.

I can't imagine getting into a swarm of those things. That one got two stings in almost instantly, then came in for a third after I smacked it off my leg.

[The AD]

I have mostly been stung by the usual yellow jackets and paper wasps growing up back east. Sucked as a kid but not noteworthy. As an aside though, a tarantula hawk buzzed by me in my back yard last week and scared the bejeebus out of me. Those things are absolutely terrifying to look at (also the highest rated on the Schmidt index of any flying hymnopteran in the world - it's basically a flying bullet ant and the east bay has got em).

Wife and I were at Zion NP a couple months back and we split up for a few hours because I wanted to hike Angels Landing and she wanted no part of it. Afterwards she had to show me this photo she took of a "huge bug" on her hike. Turns out it was a tarantula hawk. In retrospect it probably wasn't a great idea to stick a camera a foot away from it.

Here's the photo.

[Meadow Skipper]

Google pointed me to this article on tarantula hawks. Interesting:
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/absurd-...arantula-hawk/

[Skistack]

Crashed my mountain bike into the weeds last summer. So as I'm laying there assessing the damage, I feel a couple stings. Great, I think, stinging nettles. Then I start feeling more stings.

Jump up and look down - yellow jackets everywhere - and they're pissed I crashed into their nest. They're in my shorts, helmet, socks. Ended up with about 2 dozen stings, finished the ride hoping I didn't have an allergic reaction.

[ill-advised strategy]

Jump up and look down - yellow jackets everywhere - and they're pissed I crashed into their nest. They're in my shorts, helmet, socks. Ended up with about 2 dozen stings, finished the ride hoping I didn't have an allergic reaction.

Used to have a job where we went into thinned logging units to cut up and pile the downed trees. I'd be running a saw, and this was not a job or a crew where you move slow, so I'm moving fast with a running saw and totally focused on that. Before you knew it there would be wasps in your shirt, inside your hardhat, stinging your neck and shit.

It was frequent enough that seeing a guy toss the saw and go sprinting downhill ripping off clothes wasn't even alarming. I probably averaged, averaged 10 stings a week. Sometimes I got stung so many times at once it would make me feel all sick and feverish. Sometimes it was a combination of getting stung and wading through poison oak. Bouncing around in the back of a truck for 2 hours back into town feeling sick.

It's good to remember those times. 18 years later, difficulty, the difficulty of a job or a lifestyle or of making a living, is all relative to those times.

[BCMtnHound]

^^^similar experience in my junior years on a survey crew. Chain was usually clipped to the belt to leave the hands free for the blade, always telling when the chain suddenly started to run really fast past the guy taking notes.