My understanding is that bees can only sting you once, since they die with the sting. While biking home today, however, I somehow ended up getting stung not once but three times when some bee-type creature flew down my shirt. Sure enough, one sting for each boob, and one on my finger from madly slapping at my chest to get the damn thing out of there. Oh well–they hurt something fierce for a few minutes, but now the stings are just annoying and slightly itchy red marks. I’ll survive.
To add insult to injury, though, I got stung just after I’d been biking alongside a bee for a while. I’d been thinking about how amazing it was to bike at about the same speed as a flying insect, how it allows you to actually see the mechanism of it flying (instead of just seeing it as a blur as it zooms by). Maybe I’m a dork for thinking so, but I’m kind of into seeing how natural processes work, and inadvertently biking next to bugs gives me an unusual vantage point from which to understand flight.
Of course, it’d be nicer if I could look at them without being stung;) Let this be a lesson: when biking through bee country, even if it’s sunny and hot, keep your shirt zipped up.