HOW COME?: When a bee leaves its stinger behind: ouch!

Luckily for us, most bees have a live-and-let-live attitude. It takes a lot to provoke the average bee - like stepping on a worker bee on a blade of grass, or - especially - threatening her home. Most bee species are solitary, with female bees laying eggs in individual nests. But honeybees (and bumblebees) live in complex tribes. In the hive, a single queen does all the egg-laying. Thousands of female workers clean, tend to baby bees (aka larvae) and make nectar runs. The only job of the hundreds of male bees, called drones, is to mate with the queen.

Some bee species are stingless, defending themselves by simple biting. But most species do sting, and only female bees - the workers and the queen - have stingers. The stinger, with its load of toxic venom, is a worker bee's last-resort way of defending her nest or hive.

Though bumblebees, the gentle giants of the bee world, rarely sting, they live to tell the tale if they do. A bumblebee's stinger is smooth; the bee easily withdraws it and goes on her buzzing way. In honeybee clans, the queens are likewise armed with smooth stingers, the better to kill off rival queens and reign another day.

Worker honeybees aren't so lucky. Their stingers are barbed, like tiny harpoons. When a honeybee worker stings a threatening insect, she can pull the barbed stinger from the victim's squishy body and resume her life. (The stung insect isn't as lucky; the venom is lethal to it.)

But when a worker honeybee stings an animal like a bird or a bear or a human being, it's the end of the bee. Like a fish hook, the stinger firmly embeds in the target's skin. When the bee pulls away, the stinger organ rips from her abdomen, and the bee soon dies of her injury.

But even when the bee drops off the wound, the stinger's work isn't done. Tiny muscles in the venom sac continue contracting, squeezing bee venom into the skin. In fact, the firmly hooked stinger can continue to pulse out poison for several minutes. Meanwhile, like a tiny splinter of wood, the barbed ends of the stinger work their way deeper into the skin. The result? The spot where you were stung becomes more and more painful.

The tiny amount of bee venom delivered in a single sting isn't enough to sicken or kill a human being. But in the approximately 2 percent of people who are especially sensitive to the venom's proteins, the body's own allergic reaction can be life-threatening.

So to minimize pain and an allergic reaction, it's important to remove the stinger as quickly as possible. Pulling out with tweezers may compress the venom sac, squeezing out more poison. A better method is to scrape the stinger off from the side, using your fingernail, a credit card or the dull edge of a knife.

Once the stinger is out, clean the wound with soap and water or rubbing alcohol and apply ice to reduce pain and inflammation.