I was deathly allergic to bee stings, to the point that prior to going through the five year sting therapy program I was stung and woke up three hours later in the ER. Although I?ve been stung a few times since completing the therapy, it is still a very unpleasant but not life threatening event.
Years ago when I was working on my PPL my instructor noticed a bee in the cockpit of our 152. We quickly landed, he pulled the mixture and rudder us off the runway between landing lights. As soon as we stopped rolling we bailed out, ran about 20 feet, turned around and stood there staring at the plane, he just off the right wing and I just off the left.
The tower watching this called the fire trucks, which arrived in full gear ready to go to work. It turned out that we were both severely allergic and without saying a word did exactly the same thing.
One of the firemen did shoo the bee out of the plane and we were able to continue our lesson.
Here is another, not so funny story.
This spring we were heading west, over the Appalachian mountains at 10.5 on our way to Chattanooga to visit Grandma. Our son sleeping comfortably in the baby seat strapped in the baggage compartment when my wife notice a large wasp crawling on the canopy, directly above The Boy. We don?t know yet if he inhareted my bee, wasp, and ?mixed? vespid allergies so him getting stun could be a life and death issue.
At this point we had two options; circle down and land at the small country airport directly below us or continue on for the last 15 or 20 minutes to our destination where we could land and have an emergency medical crew waiting for us with a short ride to a hospital, if need bee (pun intended).
I elected to continue on to our destination as it would have taken close to 10 minutes just to cycle down and land. Other than the wasp falling on our son and flying back to the top of the canopy, which almost gave my wife a heart attack, no one was stung and the wasp flew out once we opened the canopy.
Lesson learned, don?t panic, fly the plane, and make sound / rational decisions.