Biochemistry: How to Milk a Bee

The easiest way to obtain bee venom is to get stung. But the method is plainly neither pleasant nor practical. Scientists anxious to gather the poison usually settle for a more cautious approach. They collect live insects, grab them one at a time with a pair of tweezers, then deftly slice out the venom sac; or else they persuade the stinging insects to discharge their poison through a rubber membrane.

Either system is wasteful: the bees are destroyed. But now. Dr. Rod O’Connor and a team of Montana State College chemists have developed a bee-milking method that allows not only the captured bees but wasps and hornets to produce their poison over and over again in sufficient quantities for research. A whole container of bees is anesthetized with a whiff of carbon monoxide, and then, one at a time, the insects are wrapped in a sash of aluminum foil that is connected to a source of high-voltage, low-current electricity. A brief shock causes the stinging muscles to contract and excrete venom.

Even though their milking system can cut collecting expeditions to a minimum, the Montana chemists look forward to the day when that part of their job may be done away with completely. Now that there is a better way of collecting venom, scientists even hope to learn how to synthesize the poison in the laboratory.