A few of the best options include honey, baking soda, and apple cider vinegar. You can use a wide range of natural concoctions to treat bee stings. What Are the Best Natural Remedies for Bee Stings? Once you have removed the stinger, apply a topical remedy and avoid touching or scratching the affected area. Rather, gently scrape the stinger out using your fingernail or a credit card. Avoid pulling the stinger out, as you could break the venom sac and release more venom in your body. How Should I Treat a Sting?īecause the stinger houses the venom sack, getting the stinger out of your skin is the most important first step. Your body essentially has an allergic reaction to the venom, causing itching, swelling, and pain. The venom injected in your body is the main cause of reaction. When a bee stings you it inserts its tiny barbed stinger along with a venom sac into your skin. Honey, apple cider vinegar, baking soda, and a variety of other home remedies relieve itching and burning caused by bee stings and even help prevent swelling. If you don’t suffer from bee allergies, you can easily treat bee stings. Apple Cider Vinegar and Baking Soda (4 )Ĭharcoal, Turmeric, Vitamin C, Nettle (1 )īee stings can be a bothersome and even painful experience, but having an effective home remedy on hand can help you get rid of the issue quickly and effectively.On average, I treated each sting for two and a half days. Once a sting’s symptom score no longer returned to at least 7, I quit testing on that sting area. So if it had been at least five hours since I’d used the last remedy and my symptom score had returned to 7 or higher, then I knew it was time to apply the next remedy. I set my symptom score threshold at 7, the point at which symptoms became so severe that I had trouble concentrating on anything else. However, I used the remedies on an as-needed basis: If a remedy worked so well that the symptoms went away for longer than five hours, then I waited that long to apply the next remedy. On average, I tested two remedies per day on each of the stings, spacing the applications at least five hours apart (a frequency based on the maximum number of times-three or four-you’re supposed to use an antihistamine or anti-itch cream in one 24-hour period). I left the remedies on the sting areas for 25 minutes to 45 minutes (depending on suggested use), then (as gently as possible) cleaned the sting area. This allowed me to look back at the arc of relief each remedy provided (or failed to provide). I logged a symptom score every half-hour, except while I was sleeping, of course. I kept a running log of my symptoms-pain, swelling, and itching-quantifying the severity on a scale from 0 (asymptomatic) to 10 (severe). The symptoms finally died down after four and a half days, but the experience left me wondering: How exactly are you supposed to treat a bee sting? To find out, I went back for more. Or, if any were effective, I had no way of knowing which had worked. Ice! Tobacco! Benadryl! Butter! Ban Roll-On! I tried a handful but did so in such a haphazard way-sometimes applying two remedies at once-that I gave none of the remedies an opportunity to be effective. Surprised by the sudden pain, I slapped the bee off my arm, dug the stinger out, and went inside to ask for treatment advice. (Quinn’s decade and a half of beekeeping had desensitized him to the venom.) For most, a sting means aching and swelling accompanied by a maddening itch.Īll of which I had forgotten until this past Fourth of July, when I was stung on the back of my arm. When it comes to bee stings, most of us react somewhere between Smithers on The Simpsons-for whom one sting nearly meant death-and Jon Quinn, a beekeeper I visited recently, who was once stung more than 40 times and still had the wherewithal to count as he extracted the stingers.
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