How to Treat a Bee Sting

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Dr. Susan Jewell. Now in this clip, I'm going to talk to you about bee stings, because bee stings are very common in the summertime during the year. And when you go out in the garden, or go into the woods for camping, you can get a high chance of getting stung. So when you're stung, the best thing you need to do is to immediately remove the stinger from the area that you've been stung, because if the stinger's left behind, that's going to cause all the acute swelling and the really, really painful symptoms as well as the chance of being infected. So here I have a picture of an arm, and on the arm here we have the elbow, the fingers and here's the forearm. Here is a picture of this area that was stung and the blue area here represents the stinger that was left behind by the insect - the bee or the wasp that stung you. And so what you do is, the first thing to do before you do anything else, if you could find a tweezer or something strong if you don't have a tweezer. But if you do have a tweezer, the best thing, of course, is to get one that's got the sharp end versus the blunt end. Because the sharp end is going to make it easier for you to pick out the stinger. But if you don't have a tweezer, of course when you go outdoors you don't carry a tweezer with you, then you can just use the sharp end of the under part of your small fingernails here. And what you do is you just go underneath the skin area where it's affected and if you can find the stinger is to flick it out, flick the stinger out from the area that you were stung. And in that way, it will help you to stop the area stung to get infected as well as to reduce the pain and the swelling from the bee sting or the wasp sting."