That's pretty close to right.
I keep bees, and somewhere in the 250-400 range will kill you dead.
I personally get sick if I take more than a dozen or so at once.

I hate them.  About once a year I find them the hard way and either end up stung like that or plotting their death from a distance and then executing them at night.

For some odd reason I was just thinking this the other day and wondering if they were even still a thing.
They were up there on the doom scale in the early to mid 90s.

Seems like those always go so well.

Babylon Bee article: "20-Year-Old Ohio Man Expected to Recover After Being Stung 5,000 Times by Bees"

What about the piranhas?

Wickerman?

Yeah thinking somebody typoed a couple extra zeros somewhere along the way

Attached File

Maybe, maybe not.
Lots of bees that are sold as "packages" or "nucs" come from southern states.   Easier to raise new hives there with milder winters,
The sellers may or may not know the pedigree of the queen.   That's the only one that matters.   The workers only have a lifespan in weeks, and she shouldn't be breeding with her own drones/males - those are WV bees if they do.

So who knows where this wild hive came from and how long it's occupied that tree.   Could've swarmed off or what they call absconded, left the hive box for a number of reasons.

Also all bees become very aggressive/defensive about their hive this time of year, when pollen and nectar sources dwindle.   They don't want someone or some animal stealing the food sources they've worked for with no fight.

Check out this guy's video of an aggressive hive.
Now the only way to know for certain is to have genetic tests run on the bees, but with so many coming from southern states as packages, it's not out of the question

I got stung a couple years ago at least a dozen times, through the head veil of my suit.  It was too tight fitting.   Stings along my jaw, ears.
Ears swelled up like a wrestlers cauliflower ears for a day or two.   I was not feeling too good that night, not puking buy woozy for sure.
That was an aggressive hive.   Maybe they were queenless at the time too.  
They had got me a couple times before in the garden, once at least 50' from the hives while I was just weeding.
Not sure if that was the same year one also got me right above the eye, same thing, far from the hive and the thing just attacked me
So now sometimes when I work in the garden I will at least wear a veiled cap.  

I think ML told my Dad when he went to pick up the packages that year , that they were "mutts". They had no idea of the pedigree of the queens.
Really once they're in any given bee yard or anywhere, the new queens they make will mate with whatever drones they meet up with in their bee orgy, and she will mate with a dozen or more males on that flight or two.   So you might only be able to say the hive is Italian or carniolan with that one queen you bought if she was artificially inseminated.

Nope nope nope

I don't count those as childhood worries since they still scare me

Hanging off a rope appears to be a poor place to find large hives of bees…


https://gripped.com/news/climber-dies-after-being-stung-by-killer-bees/

I have been stung by so many you can’t count the stings and I will tell you now nobody is going to take 20000 and survive.  I probably got at least 200 stings and I had gloves, veil and a wrangler work shirt on.  

Real Africanized bees would have been hitting you long before they got to cutting.

I'll stop bitching about the 15 or 20 yellow jacket stings I got last week….