Experience: I have been stung by 150 species of insect

In my job, I have been stung countless times. But nothing comes close to the pain bullet ants inflict

I carried out my first experiment with a stinging insect when I was seven, picking a honey bee off a dandelion and placing it on the arm of my teacher. My hypothesis was that it might sting her, and it turned out to be correct, much to her dismay.

Where I grew up, in the Appalachian area of the north-east US, we had lots of honey bees and wasps of various sorts. As a kid, I was stung by virtually all of them. I realised that they registered the same sort of pain - the intensity may vary from one to the next, but they were fairly similar. But an accidental run-in with a colony of harvester ants led to a life-changing revelation: they didn't feel at all as I expected they would. They really hurt.