Medicine: Bee-Sting Immunity

Most people can take repeated stings by bees or related insects of the order Hymenoptera with no worse effects than local pain and brief swelling. But some become increasingly more sensitive after successive stings, to the point of a severe, body-wide allergic reaction or even death. Every summer such severe sting reactions are a major problem to doctors; treatment consists in giving antihistamines and adrenalin or a hormone of the cortisone family. But researchers are busy on ways to prevent such cases by helping sensitized victims regain the normal degree of immunity.

Trap at Night. At Cornell University Medical College, Drs. Mary H. Loveless and William R. Fackler have worked out a painstaking method of trapping bees and wasps by chloroforming them in the nests at night, storing them in a freezer, and performing delicate surgery to remove their venom sacs while they are in a half-frozen stupor. The venom from the sacs is pooled, then injected in small but gradually increasing doses into sensitive subjects. In the New York City area, the doctors found, the most vicious stinger by far is the yellow jacket (Vespula maculifrons, represented elsewhere in the U.S. by closely related species). As with most Hymenoptera, the female of the species is the deadlier—the male has no sting.

Because surgery to remove venom sacs is so difficult, commercial producers of immunizing extracts prefer to grind up the whole insects and make them into an injectable preparation. (In this method, one school argues, there may be a danger of sensitizing a subject to allergy-causing proteins from other parts of the insect’s body.) At the Hollister-Stier Laboratories in Spokane, Bacteriologist Edward L. Foubert Jr. has concluded that only a few species of Hymenoptera are important stingers in any one area, and that since most victims do not know just which varieties have stung them, it is best to combine venoms in an extract from the whole bodies of several species.

Many Venoms. The company uses one of the common, hairless wasps (Polistes fuscatus), which usually nest under eaves or porches, in barns or garages; a hornet (Dolichovespula arenaria), which is distinguished from the typical yellow jacket by having an extra black plate between the eye and the lower jaw, and by building football-shaped nests well above ground; a yellow jacket (V. pennsylvanica), which nests underground or in crevices in rocks or walls; and the domestic honeybee (Apis mellifera).

Each stinging insect’s venom, most researchers agree, contains four or five protein substances that can cause severe sensitization reactions. In combining any two insects, e.g., wasp and yellow jacket, two of the proteins are likely to be identical, while each insect will also have two or three different ones. Thus the polyvalent extract from four species probably contains a dozen proteins, should help a sensitized victim to build up immunity against all.