Sting Apparatus
Lexikon
The bee's sting apparatus is a modified ovipositor and therefore occurs only in female bees, that is in worker bees and the queen.
The bee's sting apparatus is a modified ovipositor and therefore occurs only in female bees, that is in worker bees and the queen. It consists of the actual sting with interlocking lancets, a venom sac, the associated muscles, and two glands: the acidic venom gland, which produces the actual bee venom, and the alkaline Dufour's gland, which serves as a lubricant for the stinging process. A full venom sac contains about 0.1 milligrams of venom, which can be delivered in full during a sting.
A special feature of the honey bee is small barbs at the tip of the sting. They cause the sting to work its way ever deeper into the skin of mammals during a sting, instead of being pulled back out again. If the bee tears herself free, the complete sting apparatus, including the venom sac, musculature and its own small nerve ganglion, remains in the wound and goes on pumping in venom by itself; the bee herself dies from this injury.
A simple rule for practice follows from this: a bee sting should be scraped out of the skin as quickly as possible with a fingernail or a card rather than gripped with the fingers, because otherwise the venom sac is squeezed and even more venom is injected. Against other insects, whose exoskeleton does not hold the barbs fast, the bee can, by contrast, pull the sting back out without any problem and survives such a sting. A common misconception is therefore that bees always die after every sting; that only applies against vertebrates with correspondingly stretchable skin.