Most stingers reuse; honeybees bet the farm on one jab
A stinger is a sharp organ, usually on arthropods, that pierces skin to inject venom—though not every sting carries poison. Bites and stings get confused in first aid. Of some twenty thousand bee species, only a handful of honeybees leave barbed stingers lodged in mammal skin, killing the worker.
Stings usually sit at the rear of the body, as in the tail of a scorpion, and are found in bees, wasps and hornets, some ants such as fire ants, and scorpions. One beetle, Onychocerus albitarsis, even stings with its antennae, whose tips have evolved to look like a scorpion's tail. In every stinging member of the bee, wasp and ant order, the weapon is a converted egg-laying tube, or ovipositor. Spiders and centipedes, by contrast, only bite; centipedes do it with a pair of modified front legs called forcipules.
The pain has a chemistry. Many bees and wasps carry two venom glands, one producing an acidic toxin that includes formic acid and the other an alkaline nerve poison; each is fairly mild alone, but combined in the wound they irritate strongly. Some wasps, such as Polistes versicolor, load their venom with serotonin, which both causes pain and helps paralysing compounds spread quickly through the target. Reactions range from a small itchy bump to large blistered patches, and in rare cases a second sting triggers anaphylaxis.
Almost all stinging insects pull their weapon back out and can strike again. Among roughly 20,000 bee species, only the half-dozen honeybee species have barbs that anchor the sting in the skin, and just two wasp species share the trait. When a honeybee worker stings a mammal, the apparatus rips away and the bee dies within minutes, while the detached sting, driven by its own nerve ganglion, keeps sawing deeper and pumping venom for several minutes. It also tags the victim with alarm scent. The sacrifice only happens in elastic skin like that of birds and mammals; honeybees can sting other insects repeatedly and survive.
The word is borrowed for other animals too: the stingray's modified skin tooth, the venomous hind-leg spurs of male platypuses, and jellyfish tentacles armed with stinging cells.
Source: Stinger
