A labour of love. And pain.
The Schmidt Sting Pain Index is a pain scale rating the relative pain caused by different stinging insects. It was devised by the entomologist, Justin Schmidt who worked at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Arizona.
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Schmidt was interested in the origins of sociality in Hymenoptera, the large order of insects that comprises sawflies, wasps, bees and ants.
He hypothesised that this trait depended on the insects’ ability to produce painful venom. But no one knew how painful the different stings were, so Schmidt decided to find out.
Whenever he got stung during his fieldwork, he rated the pain on a scale of one to four and wrote a description of how it felt. Over 35 years, he received more than a thousand stings from more than 150 species.
At pain level one, Schmidt described the sting of the urban digger bee as “almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”
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In the same category, the sting of the sweat bee was said to be, “light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.”
At two, the yellowjacket wasp, “Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”
And the honeybee, like “the oven mitt had a hole in it when you pulled the cookies out of the oven.”
At three, the Maricopa harvester ant. “After eight unrelenting hours of drilling into that ingrown toenail, you find the drill wedged into the toe.”
But nothing compared with level four, reserved for the most painful insect stings, like that of the bullet ant.
“Pure, intense, brilliant pain… like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.”
Although Schmidt died in 2023, he lived long enough to receive one of the most coveted awards in science, the 2015 Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology and Entomology.
The awards, which are the light-hearted counterpart to the more serious Nobel Prizes, reward science that is fun, accessible and thought provoking.
One year after that, the so-called ‘King of Sting’ rated the sting of Synoeca septentrionalis, a black swarming wasp from Central and South America, as a 4.
He wrote down, “Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?”
Top image: a bullet ant, which has one of the most painful insect stings. Credit: Getty
