High-Speed Video Reveals Western Honey Bee's Stinging Mechanism

The stinger of the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is a last-resort defense tool that embeds itself and injects venom, usually killing the worker bee. New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences uses high-speed videography to reveal how this mechanism works in detail. Fiorella Ramirez Esquivel, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at Macquarie University, noted that modern cameras made it possible to film the stinger in action.