Rare photo of honeybee leaving its stinger behind

Kathy Keatley Garvey has won the Association for Communication Excellence gold medal for her rare photo of a honeybee leaving behind its stinger in an unfortunate (but now immortalized) human. Ms Garvey comes from a line of California dairy farmers who have kept bees since the mid 19th century. She is a communications specialist at UC Davis in the Department of Entomology. Andrea Gallo reports in the Sacramento Bee:

Garvey recognized an opportune time to capture this photo when she was walking with a friend. A bee came close to him and started buzzing at a high pitch. She said that's normally a telltale sign that a bee is about to sting, so she readied her camera and snapped four photos.
The images showed the progression of the sting, but the most interesting part was that the bee's abdominal tissue lingered behind, she said.
"As far as I know, nobody's been able to record anything like this," Garvey said. She said the only time she's seen it illustrated was in a textbook.

UCD worker wins award for rare photo of bee sting in action (via MeFi)

(Image: downsized thumbnail from a larger photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: bugs • Delightful Creatures • entomology • macro • ow • photos • Science

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/ tristan eldritch

Incredible picture, Kathy! I don’t want to be your friend though.
- http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog
  
  In a subsequent event, she and her friend were walking down a city sidewalk. She heard a tell-tale noise, like a slide whistle, which usually indicates a grand piano is falling out of a high window. Sure enough, she saw a piano descending, and readied her camera, just in time to snap a photo as the piano flattened her friend.
  - bzishi
    
    Have you been reading The Far Side today?
  - http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=3226681 Keatley Garvey
    
    This is the story behind the story about how I took the photo. The person being stung was Dr. Eric Mussen, Extension apiculturist with the UC Davis Department of Entomology. He’s a beekeeper. We were checking the hives at the apiary when the sting happened. Unexpected. Unplanned. I take many photos at the apiary. This was one of them. http://ucanr.org/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=7735
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=3226681 Keatley Garvey
  
  This is the story behind the story about how I took the photo: http://ucanr.org/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=7735
bcsizemo

Moments after this picture was captured you could hear her friend saying, “I hate you.”
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=3226681 Keatley Garvey
  
  http://ucanr.org/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=7735
http://twitter.com/writebastard Ian Wood

angerangerANGERangerYESSUCCESSSSowwwwWHYDIDN’TANYONETELLMEEEEZZZzzzzzz
- http://twitter.com/trempls tré
  
  If bees understood that their attacks were kamikaze in nature, they would all back out at the last minute. And the world would be an infinitely better place.
  - chenille
    
    “No, though we are called on to give up everything, the price is not too high. For it is paid for our beloved queen, and the little grubs in the honeycomb – it is paid for the good of the hive. What bee, then, could ever give any less? Besides, we live like nine months anyway, and that’s only if we hibernate.”
    
    At least I think that was the translation. The dance gets a little confusing.
    - DevinC
      
      I happen to be fluent in Bee, and I think this is a more literal translation:
      
      ”We few, we happy few, we band of sisters;
      For she to-day that sheds her sting with me
      Shall be my sister; be she ne’er so vile,
      This day shall gentle her condition;
      And the drones in the hive now-a-bed
      Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
      And hold their dronehoods cheap whiles any speaks
      That stung with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!”
flickerKuu

Such a rare picture that only a search for “bee stinging” on Google images could find another.
Still a cool picture though.
awjt

Of course it’s the Sacramento Bee and not the Modesto Bee.
Rider

How is this a rare image? It’s pretty damn easy to set up and get a picture of this.

https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod%3D19&q=bee+stinging+arm&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=M_DcT9CSHIL48gSipe2ECw&biw=1366&bih=600&sei=NvDcT_DoH4L28wSaxITVCg#um=1&hl=en&safe=off&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=bee+stinging&oq=bee+stinging&aq=f&aqi=g4g-m3g-S3&aql=&gs_l=img.3..0l4j0i5l3j0i24l3.22898.28027.2.28478.23.12.0.8.2.2.157.1092.9j3.12.0…0.0.aM3wzYqqSWM&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=9acfb678512e3c7f&biw=1366&bih=600
- chenille
  
  There are a lot of photos of unfortunate skin stung by unfortunate bees, but I didn’t notice any where the bee is flying away.
  - http://www.madziabryll.com Cefeida
    
    Two in that particular search.
    - chenille
      
      Ok, on close examination, there are one or two. More often the bee is walking away, though; mid-air is much harder to photograph. I think that still qualifies as rare.
E T

Who is more unfortunate – an unfortunate (but now immortalized) human or an unfortunate (but now immortalized) bee? The bee dies, the human get a sting.
- http://mjfgates.myopenid.com/ mjfgates
  
  Yay, free stinger! … no, wait…
- timquinn
  
  Not enough information.
jaytkay

OWWWW!!
Jason Baker

I felt like I needed a unicorn chaser. Seeing the pain of that bee was just too much, to say nothing of the person.

Then I envisioned a unicorn leaving its head-mounted “stinger” behind in someone, and suddenly, the unicorn chaser didn’t seem like such a great idea. Between this and the tarantula fungus, you’re really traumatizing the idea of animals with pointy appendages being a good thing.
http://twitter.com/matcatastrophe mat catastrophe

Seems like bees evolved all sorts of stupid.
- Inventorjack
  
  Their stingers developed for defending their hives by stinging the rigid bodies of other bees and insects, not for stinging the stretchy skin of mammals. One bee can sting another bee/insect several times.
  - http://twitter.com/matcatastrophe mat catastrophe
    
    There’s also the matter of being killed during sex and being thrown out of the hive if you don’t have sex. Basically, you don’t want to be a bee.
  - zombiebob
    
    never thought of it that way, though I’ve never seen a bee sting anything not human. So are wasps just more bad ass in terms of their anatomy?
  - bkad
    
    What is the theory to explain why wasps and hornets don’t have this limitation? (I understand not everything has to confer and evolutionary benefit or cost.)
    
    It is not as though honeybees don’t face mammalian threats to their hives. Black bears, for example, attack hives with alacrity. And also humans, though we’ve mostly moved to ‘animal husbandry’ with respect to honeybees, same as most everything else we eat.
    
    Though I will say I really don’t need to be stung multiple times by a bee to learn to leave bee hives alone. I can be stung a half dozen times over years by completely different species, let alone different individual bees, and still develop a generalized response to avoid things that look, or sound, like stinging insects in flight.
    - bkad
      
      My dad kept honeybees, though, so I know you can mess with hives if properly clothed and equipped. But that’s different, because we controlled the encounter. Heck, we built the hive for the bees to live in. I have a much more apprehensive response if I encounter a hive when hiking. Tree-nesting insects don’t bother me as much as ground nesting insects, though. It is unlikely that I’m going to disturb an aerial nest by mistake. But those damned underground yellowjacket nests are just unfair. You’re a flying animal, for Pete’s sake. You should be in the sky. The ground is MY domain.
    - chenille
      
      I think Inventorjack is entirely wrong here.
      
      Honeybee stings have barbs, which increase the damage they do. This means they break off against mammals. However, they break off in just such a way that the glands go with it, and keep pumping autonomously for a long time.
      
      @zombiebob:disqus : Wasps (and some other bees, like bumblebees) don’t have the same kind of barbs. This lets them sting us more than once, but true, but it means their sting is physically weaker.
      
      @boingboing-e16a4ca71de93b9d1e35186e568d9fdf:disqus : This difference make a lot more sense if you consider fighting mammals than insects. Wasps are predatory, and have no trouble killing insects if they can sting them. They probably don’t have as much concern from mammals, though.
      
      On the other hand, honeybees have large colonies, with much more plentiful workers but also more alluring food stores, and so more threat from mammals. It really looks to me, then, that the upgraded sting is at least partly adapted for driving them off.
      
      After all, a worker is sacrificed because her sting breaks off, but this is precisely what enables it to continue injecting poison and do as much damage as possible. It seems hard to imagine that’s purely incidental to its function.
Inventorjack

This makes me sad. I love bees. They just don’t understand that unlike stinging another insect, stinging us means certain death :(
BombBlastLightingWaltz

someone call my laywer… This is not just, but I alude too, like that high school thing that teacher did with the internet and the shouldnotof…..man having your ass takin out like that! Literally. No shit that bee don’t live.
- xian
  
  Put the bottle down and step away from the keyboard. Thank you.
http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com robcat2075

Fly all day, dance all night. The bee life can’t end well.
http://twitter.com/zeroanaphora แอ็ะปปี้

I find it hard to believe nobody’s yet thought to do super-slow-mo footage of that happening, for some nature documentary.
bkad

Or “Wha…. Oww! “