The intrepid entomologist, stung hundreds of times, died on February 18th, aged 75
by a wasp, an ant or a bee raises—beyond the “Ow!”—immediate questions. How can a creature so tiny inflict such remarkable pain? And why, when all you have done is to make a jam sandwich or dare to eat a peach, does it launch such a vicious and unprovoked attack?
Most famously, in 1983, he compiled the Schmidt Index, ranking the stings of 78 insects from one to four according to their pain. Most he had endured himself—felt he had to endure, because of his list—though colleagues chipped in. The honey bee was his anchoring value, since most people knew what a bee sting felt like, and was rated a two. He also provided a line or so, trembling on the edge of poetry, to describe each pain precisely.
Solitary insects, he found, tended to have a much milder sting than those organised into complex colonies. From this he deduced that stings allowed insects to get more food, hence build social structures, hence need to defend the nest, the workers, the immobile larvae and the whole teeming enterprise. The greater the danger, the higher the venom’s potency—even, in the case of a colony of paper wasps he was annoying once, blinding him when it was sprayed in microdroplets through the air.
In general, he thought insects got a raw deal. Government research funding went to bigger creatures; no one seemed to care about wasps, or even ants. So although he held a senior post for 25 years at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Centre in Tucson, part of the federal Department of Agriculture, he worked on his own self-funded projects much of the time. They included looking for insects whose stings he might not have experienced yet.
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