Luke O'Neill

speaker

4,397 appearances 23 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 6d ago

Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.

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Show Me the Science with Luke O'Neill · The Science of Stings · 10 Sep 2026 podcast

This is a peptide as well.

And melatonin latches onto cells and damages them.

damages their membranes.

And those cells then release their contents, and it's very inflammatory.

It's a bit like you're causing cells in the skin to explode, and that's promoting the inflammation as well.

And it's also got a thing called apamin, apis from B. And apamin affects potassium channels, again, in nerve cells in the skin.

And if you cause the potassium channels to open, that causes a pain sensation as well.

So it's slightly different in that it's got these other components,

And again, why is the bee doing it?

Well, it uses this stuff to kill its prey and eat it.

And secondly, then, of course, in the hive, again, if the hive gets damaged, they come out and they start stinging to protect the hive and make the animal go away or whatever it is that's on the hive.

And of course, as humans, we take honey and the bee will try to defend itself and sting you with its stinger.

So again, evolution there, allowing it to have its own defence system.

And how do you treat it?

Very similar again.

Cold compress is good.

Histamine is part of this massive reaction as well that gets made in the skin.

So you can use antihistamines too, just like you can't eat a bit of paracetamol again to get rid of some of the inflammation.

So the way we treat the bee sting then is a bit similar to the wasp sting, except get the stinger out

because if you remove the stinger, that slows everything down, I suppose, and stops the stuff being pumped in.

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