When I was 12, I was stung by a Tarantula Hawk 24 times.

Certainly the most painful experience of my life.

The recent stories of the Japanese Giant Hornet invading the US northwest, I was looking at some news reports on the Youtube.
It auto loaded the next clip, some dude named "Coyote Petersen" allowing himself to be stung by one of these scary mofos..

This was the next video ob the list (not for the faint of heart)
https://www.youtube.co​m/watch?v=MnExgQ81fhU

This guy has made it his JOB to get stung by these beasties, . he's only being stung once in this video.
He is rating the stings, and comparing the pain level to an older scale made by some scientist. https://en.wikipedia.o​rg/wiki/Schmidt_sting_​pain_index The Schmidt Pain Index in which the Tarantula Hawk was historically number 2 on that list behind only the Bullet Ant.
(now superseded by at least three more that pushed it down the scale.)

In the late 1970s, with no internet etc. I had NO IDEA that the Tarantula Hawks sting was considered to be so high on this scale. I just new it was nearly crippling for me when it happened all those years ago. All the stings were on my legs, as I tried to run away. 11 in one leg, 13 in the other. In hindsite, I should have put it together, as from then on, bee stings and the brown mud dobber wasp stings never felt bad, I actually thought I had built up an immunity to stings. (I was immune to mosquito bites for about 20 years, but that's another story.) Now I can only imagine it was a matter of comparison.

That is one crazy dude there. Looking at the pain he went thru on one sting I cannot image what you went through with 24 stings. Crap!

The expression " what a twit" comes to mind !

Why the hell would anyone want to find out if one thing is more painful than another unless he/she has something sadly amiss from the neck up

I think that the most painful sting I have had was from a wasp I had just rescued from our garage and chucked it outside. I walked out of the main door and sudddenly had a stinging sensation between my toes. I was wearing flip flops and the dammed thing had got under my foot. I have been stung before, but this just about put me out! And it lasted for over an hour.

Now, wasps are OK outside, but inside and they are DEAD!

I appreciate your live and let live attitude towards them,. in my case, this was only one bad experience with wasps (but BY far the worst!)

I consider my relationship with Wasps to be this, DEFCON1 Declared War!

In my life on the farm as a youth, and my time as a carpenter, they have caused me much pain and suffering. Swollen hand, twisted ankle from a fall from a ladder, etc. All Out WAR!

Last year I was stung by a wasp on the top of my foot right at the ankle and it was pretty painful - not something I'd want to replicate on purpose, that's for sure !

Jake

I just know that I am not going to like the answer, but I have to ask. You got stung 24 times. What were you doing for the last 23?

ECC233 wrote in post #19067440
Jake

I just know that I am not going to like the answer, but I have to ask. You got stung 24 times. What were you doing for the last 23?

Running. At least for 22 of them.

So the story is, I was picking wild blueberries.
I found a really nice patch and was thinking I was going to get quarts of them when I heard the buzzing sound near me feet. I saw the wasp and the dock spider struggling, the sound of the wings in the pine nettles was terrifying, akin to a rattler (we got those on occasion too)

I grew up infatuated with nature shows, I had seen this exact battle in ultra low res B&W TV on "Wild Kingdom" as narrated by William Conrad, so I knew what was going on. I beat a hasty retreat.

Trouble was the blueberry picking was really bad elsewhere,. so after about an hour? (who knows in the mind of an eleven year old at the vacation spot in summer really?) I decided to try and move back into this magic blueberry patch. I saw no sign of the battle, and settled in. I was only at it for a few minutes when the first sting got me right in the bottom of my foot.

You see, I hadn't seen them anymore as the wasp had done what comes next, it had dragged the now paralyzed spider down it's own hole to lay the eggs. It was likely doing exactly that when I stood on the burrows' opening. A mother Pepsis wasp in the act of laying eggs, and I disturbed it.

The initial pain in my foot was unreal, blinding I thought I had stepped on a downed power line and a scorching red hot dagger at the same time!
Of course the immediate reaction of lifting my foot off of said source of leaking electricity, freeing mama wasp to continue the assault, next it was on my ankle,. and I got the 2nd jolt. By now I had pieced together what was happening, I was being stung by this terrifying TV wasp,. and the dock, and (hopefully?) safety of the lake were a few hundred yards away, so i ran. I ran right through the juniper bushes, right over all the stuff that a normal bare footed shorts wearing child would avoid, all the time feeling the pain tearing up my calves. I was moving so fast and so forcefully through those nettles I honestly though the new pain was the needles scratching my legs,. I was apparently becoming desensitized with the adrenaline rush. But the wasp was still there, I could feel it, liek it was bounding back and forth from one leg to the other. Why weren't the bushes swatting it off?!

I don't remember jumping into the lake, or pulling myself back out. The next thing I actively remember after that flight was sitting alone on the end of the dock with my legs dangling in the water in the hopes of cooling the burning. The pain was so bad I "came to" to find myself there. The dunk in the water hadn't been enough. I have no idea how long I had been sitting there when I "woke"

Each of the stings left a huge purple welt. Purple! Like crazy dead zombie flesh purple. (i didn't know what a zombie was yet) They were big, and easy to count. I was still sitting there counting the purple spots when my aunt and sister finally found me there. I could not bring myself to take my legs out of the water, as even submerged, they felt like they were burning up from the inside,.

I think I was about 5 years old when I decided throwing a rock at a swarm of Bees would be fun. The Bees provided instant feedback on what they thought of my idea. It was negative feedback in case you were wondering. I don't know how many times I was stung but it was numerous.

So referencing the Schmidt guide and 24 Tarantula Hawk stings, I think I will amend the pain description of my experience to 'quite a sting'.
The fear in seeing the Bees coming for me was worse than the actual stings.

Shudders. I've had bee stings since, and indeed they are quite tame, and unlike wasps/hornets, I love the little guys. ߐ

But a pepsis wasp is at least a solitary beast. It would be quite a trick to manage to be stung by more than one at a time.

The real terror of the stinging world resides in the rain forest of Costa Rica. The Executioner Wasp. It's poison is a combination of the nerve toxins found in most wasps, and a flesh dissolving venom found in giant centipedes and the Brown Recluse spider. And it is a "paper wasp", ie: it makes huge colonies of thousands in elaborate paperlike nests. It's sting is now considered to be worse than anything Schmidt ever put on his scale. An interaction with a hive would almost definitely be deadly.

Bees love to sting me. I can count on it happening several times each summer. Spiders like me too; twice I have been bitten by a Black Widow. The the worst thing that ever happened was getting stung on my forearm by a hornet. Outside of the pain, my arm looked like hamburger meat by the 3rd day. I had to have wound care daily for 2 weeks before it started healing up. I cannot imagine what the Japanese Giant Hornet could inflict.

Jake that sounds like a horrific incident for a kid. I can tell it traumatized you for life.

Irukandji are pretty nasty.
The pain is extreme, but the nasty bit is the psychoactive effect that makes you think you are going to die. (They can be deadly but usually not).

I surfed when I was younger so Blue bottles (Portuguese man o' war) were a common hazard. Not pleasant but bearable.
It never happened to me but the worst Blue bottle experience was getting several washed into your wet suit, so usually you would be underwater being pounded by a wave when the pain hit and once the turbulence had passed you now had the Blue bottles firmly held in place, spread across your skin maximizing the surface area of the stingers.

You certainly have some of the best nasties in the world there Dave !

My sister and b-in-law live north of you, in Lawrence, and she won't even go in the sea!

Mind you, you don't need to go in the sea to find the nasties do you

Where we were in France the Asian hornets were starting to appear. We were told that if we saw one then just back away because if they sting they are not alone and they send out some kind of pheramone that gets all the others to attack too and that is a very dangerous situation.

The nastiest things we had there were caterpillars! Pine processionary caterpillars.

My grandfather did the stone in the wasp's nest thing when he was a kid too. He was terrified of wasps until he died.

How cool! We have processionary caterpillars, I'd love to see a procession. I'd pass on touching them though. Not far south of your sister they cause a lot of problems to Horses.

Up in this 1/2 we have 2 types of processionary jobbies. Pine and oak. No pine ones in the U.K. I am glad to say, not yet anyway, but the oak jobs are in some bits and are not so dangerous to moving about things like people because they don't come out of the trees to pupate.

I think I would use my catapult at long range to hit a wasp nest, and then run!