THE STINGER OF THE LEAF-CUTTING BEE
(Megachile brevis, Say)
The sting or “stinger” of a bee is indeed a most wonderful piece of mechanism. At the base, inside the body of the bee, lie bars or levers, operated by muscles, which push the darts out and draw them in. The poison sac lies just behind this mechanism and pours the poison into a set of cup-like valves, from which it escapes into the wound along longitudinal grooves in the sting like grease along the piston of an engine.
The sting itself is not, then, hollow, like the spider’s poison fang, but is a poisoned stiletto as long as the bee’s foreleg which she can thrust in and out with incredible rapidity, and which, as everyone knows, can inflict a painful wound on creatures millions of times her size.
