For you folks who are getting stung a lot: WATCH OUT!
I've probably been stung 100-200 times since I was a kid, but one summer about 10 years ago, I got stung maybe 3 times in one summer by some kind of ground hornets, and I had a reaction too.
I was cutting firewood and got into a nest of them I guess, and got stung, but I kept working. I was smoking a cigarette at the time and a couple minutes after I got stung I started to feel dizzy (thought it was the cigarette) so I shut down the saw, crushed out my cigarette and sat down.
Then the soles of my feet started to itch LIKE YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE. They itched so bad, I took off my boots and socks and started scrubbing the soles of my feet in the leaf litter. Then my armpits and crotch started itching, and I realized something was wrong. Walked back to the house and my face was beet red but also pale - weird. Figured I was having a beesting reaction, and went to the hospital, and sure enough, I was.
The doc gave me a couple shots of epinephrine (adrenaline) and everything went back to normal after a couple hours.
The thing is, the doc said that if I got stung by the same kind of hornet again, the reaction would likely be much more severe and would come on within SECONDS, because my body was now "sensitized" to that toxin.
He said if that happened, if I didn't shoot myself up with the epinephrine IMMEDIATELY, I would pretty much be dead. (This actually happened to a friend of the family -- he got stung, and he ran back toward his house to retrieve his beesting "kit" and he dropped dead on his front doorstep.)
The bad thing about an anaphylactic allergic reaction is that your body basically KILLS ITSELF. It senses that there is a toxin in your blood, so to protect the body's tissues, your body lowers your blood pressure so severely, that your heart can't get enough blood to feed itself. In other words, your body basically starves itself to death.
I don't mean to overdramatize the issue, but if you get an allergic reaction, you need to carry that Epi-Pen with you at all times when there are bees around.
Be careful out there!
CA