Wasp Sting v Bullet Ant

I was at a friend’s birthday party the other day recounting my wasp sting story…

Ouch!

…when someone there told us about a tribe that uses wasps in a glove as a manhood rite of passage. I looked it up and he didn’t get it quite right (I think he had had a few too many) as it’s actually an ant from Brazil – aptly named the bullet ant. Apparently the bullet ant sting is the most painful sting in the Hymenoptera (over 150,000 species recognized) order of insects which comprises sawflies, wasps, bees and ants. (Source: Wikipedia).

This subject of stings was yielding such rich information that I delved further reading that Justin O. Schmidt an etymologist from Arizona developed the Schmidt Sting Pain Index which ranks my paper wasp sting in third place! Each category has an utterly wonderful description of the pain that any writer/reader would find a little devilish pleasure in reading.

1.0 Sweat bee: “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.”
1.2 Fire ant: “Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.”
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: “A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.”
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: “Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.”
2.0 Yellowjacket: “Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”

2.x Honey bee and European hornet: “Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.”
3.0 Red harvester ant: “Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.”
3.0 Paper wasp: “Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of Hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.”
4.0 Pepsis wasp: “Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).”
Pepsis wasp is bigger than you think. I ran across it at a museum display with a pin through it.
Pepsis wasp’s prey! A tarantula.
4.0+ Bullet ant: “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”

An indigenous Brazilian tribe known as the Sateré-Mawé take masochism or machismo to new heights when they sedate bullet ants with one of the many naturally occurring drugs  in the rain forest. They carefully weave many of the ants into a glove made of leaves that many commentators say resembles an oven mitt. The stings face inside the glove ready for when the ants awake, angry and ready to cause maximum pain. A boy, ready for manhood, puts his hand into the glove of pain. According to Wikipedia the boy may shake uncontrollably for days, and when the poor kid recovers he has to repeat the ordeal up to twenty times over the next few years to finally prove – he is a man.

To give a taste of what the pain really is like here is a from our friends down under; Ozy’s love to prove their manliness and Haimish could only hold his hands in for a few seconds…

(I’d like to say I’d be as tough as a Sateré-Mawé boy, but I’d probably last as long as Haimish did and with the huge reaction I had to the paper wasp would probably need medical treatment a lot earlier…)