The holly venom: How can a bee sting save your life

Have you ever been stung by a bee? I have. I was in one of those movie-like moments, enjoying a beautiful sunny day in a wonderful park, surrounded by nature, filling my lungs with fresh air and of course without shoes so that I could deeply feel the softest, moist and green morning grass of all… slipping through my toes in a wonderful massage given by mother nature, when BANG!!!!!!!! A terrible pain as if I had stepped on a box of nails started flowing from my feet up to my brain….. what the hell just happened!!!!!!!!! OUCHHHH!!! I can tell you IT DOES HURT!.

I grew up listening that in case that happened, you should quickly remove the bee sting and suck all the venom you can, it never occurred to me that letting the poison flow through my bloodstream could have any benefit. When I grew older, I recall watching on the TV this emerging therapy called “apitherapy” in which some guy was picking up bees from a flask with tweezers and putting them in some other person’s body to sting …. On purpose!!!! How crazy can people be!!!!!!

But what is it behind this bee venom. As a scientist I just had to know and now I want you to read probably the most amazing bee story of your life. It goes like this.

Who do you think would win a battle between bees and bacteria?

In the spring of 1996, at the age of 27, Ellie Lobel an active woman and mother of three kids, was bitten by a tick. Ellie didn’t know to look for the characteristic bull’s-eye rash when she was bitten- she thought it was just a weird spider bite.

Then came three months with flu-like symptoms and horrible pains that moved around the body. She was incapacitated. Her first doctor told her it was just a virus and it would run its course. So did the next. Ellie went to doctor after doctor, each giving her a different diagnosis. Multiple slecrosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia. None of them realized she was infected with Borrelia, a bacteria transmitted by ticks, until more than a year after she contacted the disease-and by then, it was far too late. Lyme bacteria, as it is called, are exceptionally good at adapting and capable of dodging both the immune system and the arsenal of antibiotics currently available. Although she kept doing treatment after treatment, she got worse. She describes being stuck in bed or a wheelchair and not being able to think clearly, but she kept fighting, with every antibiotic, every pharmaceutical, every holistic treatment she could find¹.     

After fifteen years, she gave up. So she packed up everything and moved to California to die. And she almost did. Less than a week after moving, Ellie was attacked by a swarm of bees. Ellie was in California for three days before her attack. At this point, Ellie was struggling to stand on her own. She had a caregiver on hand to help her.

She was just standing near a broken wall and a tree when the first bee appeared, she remembers, “just hitting me in the head. All of a sudden-boom!-bees everywhere.” Her caregiver ran. But Ellie couldn’t run. She couldn’t even walk. “They were in my hair, in my head, all I heard was this crazy buzzing in my ears. I thought, THIS IS IT. I’m just going to die right here”.

Ellie, like 1-7% of the world’s population, is severely allergic to bees. When she was two, a sting put her into anaphylaxis, a severe reaction of the body’s immune system that can include sweeling, nausea and narrowing of the airways. She nearly died. She stopped breathing and had to be revived by defibrillation. Her mother drilled a fear to bees into her to ensure she never ended up in the same dire situation again. So when the bees descended, Ellie was sure that this was the end.

Bees are armed with a potent sting that many of us are all too aware of. Their venom is a mixture of many compounds. Perhaps the most important is a tiny 26-amino-acid peptide called Melittin, which constitutes more than half of the venom of honey bees. This little compound is responsible for the burning pain associated with bee stings. It tricks our bodies into thinking that they are quite literally on fire.

 “I just went limp. I put my hands up and covered my face because I didn’t want them stinging me into the eyes… The next thing I know, the bees are gone”, says Ellie.

When the bees finally dissipated, her caregiver tried to take her to the hospital, but Ellie refused to go. “This is God’s way of putting me out of my misery even sooner”, she told him. “I’m just going to accept this. I locked myself in my room and told him to come collect the body tomorrow”.

But Ellie didn’t die. Not that day, and not the three to four months later. “I just can’t believe that was three years ago and I just can’t believe where I am now. I had all my blood work done. Everything. We tested everything. I’m so healthy”.

After the attack, Ellie watched the clock, waiting for anaphylaxis to set in, but it didn’t. Instead, three hours later, her body was racked with pains. Ellie thinks that these weren’t a part of an allergic response, but instead indicated a Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction-her body was being flooded with toxins from dying bacteria. A theory is that certain bacterial species go down swinging, releasing nasty compounds that cause fever, rash and other symptoms. For days she was in pain. Then, she wasn’t.

With a now-clear head, Ellie started wondering what had happened. So she did what anyone else would do: Google it. Disappointingly, her searches turned up very little. But she did find one 1997 study, where it was found that melittin killed Borrelia². Exposing cell cultures to purified melittin, they reported that the compound completely inhibited Borrelia growth. Soon after melittin was added, the bacteria were effectively paralysed, unable to move as their outer membranes were under attack and then they were killed.

My “friend-beans-Chagas disease-bees” connection

I know it may sound like tangled up spaghetti in your head. But thing is a couple days ago, my friend advice me to keep my daughter away from the beans that are given to her in her school lunch. Of course I asked why, since beans are the basis of any food here in Brazil. She told me that it is because of a Chagas disease outbreak and that it seems that people can get infected through parasites growing in beans. Chagas disease is a tropical parasitic disease caused by the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi and is spread mostly by insects known as kissing bugs. The symptoms change over the course of the infection, going from fever, headaches, swollen lymph nodes, to enlargement of the ventricles of the heart leading to heart failure, among other symptoms.

Anyways, after she texted me sending pictures of this nasty parasites in beans, I immediately googled it. And guess what, what I found was an interesting 2013 paper entitled “Melittin peptide kills Trypanosoma cruzi parasites by inducing different cell death pathways”³. So I texted her back saying, ”ok, so if you or anyone you know get infected with Chagas disease, I highly recommend you to go play Winnie the Pooh chasing beehives or to take a walk in the park without shoes… or just try apitherapy”.

Melittin therefore, holds promises in the cure of several parasite-transmitted diseases, but also for viral diseases, since it has been shown that it inhibits replication of murine retroviruses, tobacco mosaic virus and herpes simplex virus. This anti-viral activity of Melittin has been attributed to direct lysis of viral membranes. However, Melittin also displays anti-viral activity at much lower non-virolytic concentrations, as shown for T cells chronically infected with human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV-1), where it as been shown that it suppress production of HIV-1 by acutely infected cells.

Venoms: a juicy target for pharmaceutical companies

Modern science has slowly begun to take apart venoms, piece by piece, to understand how they do the things they do. Most of them are complex cocktails of compounds, with dozens to hundreds of different proteins, peptides and other molecules. Each compound has a different task that allows the venom to work with maximum efficacy- any parts moving together to immobilize, induce pain or do whatever it is that the animal needs its venom for.

Venoms started to be screened against specific therapeutic targets in the 2000s. Of the seven venom-derived pharmaceuticals on the international market, the most successful, captopril, was derived from a peptide found in the venom of the Brazilian viper (Bothrops jararaca). 

This venom has been known for centuries for its potent blood-thinning ability (one tribe are said to have coated their arrow tips in it to inflict maximum damage) and the drug has made its parent company more than a billion dollars and become a common treatment for hypertension. It’s being said that captopril is not only one of the top twenty drugs of all time, but it has been one of the most persistent, outside of maybe aspirin.

There is a lot more research to do on these venoms…. But in the meantime, don’t be scared of bees… who knows what they could do to you.

1. http://mosaicscience.com/story/how-bee-sting-saved-my-life-poison-medicine
2. Lubke LL, Garon CF (July 1997). "The antimicrobial agent melittin exhibits powerful in vitro inhibitory effects on the Lyme disease spirochete". Clin. Infect. Dis. 25 (Suppl 1): S48–51.
3. Adade, C., Oliveira, I., Pais, J. and Souto-Padrón, T. 2013. Melittin peptide kills Trypanosoma cruzi parasites by inducing different cell death pathways. Toxicon 69: 227-239.