Most painful insect sting

In 1983, American entomologist Justin O Schmidt from the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Arizona, USA, published a detailed pain index of insect stings, based on a four-point scale, having tested a very large number of different species of stinging insect upon himself. The most painful sting, registering 4.0+ on his index, was that of the bullet ant (Paraponera clavata), native to Nicaragua and southwards through Central America to Paraguay in northern South America. Schmidt described its sting as: "like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel". Others have said that the pain is like being shot – hence its name, "bullet ant".

Just behind the bullet ant in the index, each with a rating of 4.0, are the warrior wasps (genus Synoeca) and tarantula hawk wasps (family Pompilidae), the latter of which are the world's largest wasps.