The stinger of a western honey bee is a weapon of last resort, designed to embed itself and deposit venom in flesh — most often resulting in the worker bee's death.

New research published in the is quite literally shedding light on what makes this defence mechanism so effective.

"Being able to actually film them in action was a brand new thing that is only really possible thanks to modern cameras," said Fiorella Ramirez Esquivel, lead author and postdoctoral researcher with Macquarie University in Australia.

Because bee stings happen in the blink of an eye, Ramirez Esquivel and her team used cameras capable of capturing hundreds of frames per second. The translucence of the venom sac and stinger allowed them to use strong lighting to better outline the distinct structures inside.

The experiments used live honey bees, removing their stinger and killing them immediately after. Because the stinger remains active for only about two minutes once separated from the bee's body, Ramirez Esquivel said she had to work fast.

"I'm removing the stinger from the bee and then I have to stick it into this artificial [skin substitute] and I have about four millimetres of space where I have to get it exactly right," she told CBC News from Sydney.

Double-piston design The results show how two specialized valves are doing two jobs at once: driving the barbed stinger deeper while continuously pumping venom from the sac down into the flesh.

The paper describes it as a "double piston design," but the system is a lot more complex than a standard car engine, where a single piston moves up and down inside a cylinder.

"Now imagine that you have two of them, and they have to be moving past each other when they go past," Ramirez Esquivel said, "and as they reverse direction, they have to collapse so that the fluid can flow around it." It's a delicate dance that the researchers recreated using 3D printing to better understand how the valves move past each other — allowing venom to keep flowing while also propelling the stinger deeper.

Juliana Rangel, professor of apiculture at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the study, said she found the videos fascinating because they go beyond the scanning electron microscope images and diagrams she's used to seeing.

"We have known forever [about the stinger and its parts] because we have been the victims of these stinging events for tens of thousands of years," Rangel said. "But we just didn't know, really, how that venom continues to be pumped for so long after the release of the stinging apparatus." The study says twitches and minute movements of the stinger can continue for as long as 15 minutes.

Kill and be killed Leaving behind part of the body as a defence mechanism is called autotomy, but not all bees do it. The western honey bee is a social species whose colony functions as a "superorganism" that workers help protect. Its drastic defence mechanism has to punch above a small bee's weight.

"This stinging structure and the evolution of the stinging apparatus … it's kind of an insurance policy," Rangel told CBC News from College Station, Texas. "That the life was lost for a good cause, which is defence of the larger colony." Rangel added that almost all other bees that sting don't have barbs that help the stinger remain embedded in an animal because, unlike female worker honey bees, they need to survive in order to reproduce. Female worker honey bees are sterile and don't produce offspring themselves.

Honey bee stingers also release pheromones, chemical signals that recruit other bees to join an attack against a threat.

The defence mechanism doesn't always work against tougher skin or fur, Rangel says, but barbs and continuous penetration likely improve the chances of warding off an attacker.

Nature as inspiration Though native to Europe, western honey bees are now found around the world and have been studied for hundreds of years. Our relationship with them stretches even further.

"It goes back about 9,000 years," said Lauren Ponisio, associate professor and ecologist at the University of Oregon. "There are cave paintings that describe people actually harvesting honey and wax from colonies. It doesn't show up until the Egyptians that we start seeing active management." Fast-forward to 1758, when Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus scientifically classified the species. Their stingers, the study notes, were described in great detail in the early 1900s by American entomologist Robert E. Snodgrass.

But by using high-speed videography, researchers are revealing more about this complex system — findings that could potentially have medical applications.

"It's not stopping and starting like a … syringe. The plunger for a syringe, it goes down once and that's it," Ramirez Esquivel said. "But because we have two plungers effectively, then you can have continuous flow." Ponisio says this study also makes her wonder about other bees that produce honey but differ significantly from western honey bees, including species native to the Americas.

"It does lead to really interesting questions of … well, you have these other honey producing bees, why don't they have stingers? And how did that work out for them?" Ponisio said.