This is what happens when an ant bites you, no wonder it hurts so much

Have you ever been burned by ants? In fact, ants don't bite you with their teeth. All the pain you suffer comes from the sting of a needle on the tail of an ant. Indispensable are the burning venom droplets secreted from it.

Close-up of a venomous ant that comes out of a needle.

In a video published this week in Science, Adrian Smith, a biologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, first shot a close-up ant venom out of a needle.

And these are very sharp images showing the delicate attack mechanism of ants: The needles of these insects are thinner than the diameter of a human hair. It consists of 3 parts assembled together, forming channels for the venom to secrete.

Those parts can move very fast. It only takes 75 milliseconds for each prong to continually dig into your skin and release the venom. It is even faster than the blink of an eye:

• Experience the stinging pain when deliberately letting the "killer" cow killer burn
• To be bitten more than 1,000 times, the scientist completed the 'Insect Pain Pain Scale'