Back in the late 1990's, when I was working with Spider Bob (now deceased) and helping run the American Tarantula Society, we used to get donations from our members, most of whom kept arachnids. They would collect or breed these animals, and send us some because they loved us so much, or because they had too many and didn't know what to do with them. Or both.
We had quite a few members in Arizona...in fact, our demographics were not all that unlike those of Daily Kos. In Arizona, there are many fine arachnids, including scorpions. There are desert hairy scorpions, fine friendly low-toxicity venom scorpions, and then there are Centruroides exilicauda, which are not.
I kind of had to take about everything, though, since we were broke all the time, and I could sell them via the society. I did the critter-tending and the packaging for the mail order, which is a fine art. Generally these animals do not want to be packed into tiny little containers and they will bite or sting you or otherwise engage in escape maneuvers, if you don't know the moves.
I knew the moves. What I didn't know, though, when we received a box with some bark scorpions (as C.e. are known), was how to keep bark scorpions. In fact, I didn't know very much about bark scorpions at all, for instance that if you have a bunch of them in a plastic shoebox with bark scorpion-sized holes a bit up the side, they will climb up upon each other, like a little scorpioid ladder, and exit forthwith.
Spider Bob and I were both pretty poor back then, and we had no beds. We had our own personal bedrooms with our own personal mattresses, and that was about it at the time.
Early one morning around perhaps four, I was vaguely asleep, arm thrown onto the floor, when I felt an odd tiny burning sting on my hand. Living as I did in a house full of caged arachnids, it did not take me long to jump to the obvious conclusion.
I went and rousted Spider Bob, who responded grumpily. "One of the bark scorpions got me!" I announced, in a fair amount of terror.
He looked me over for a bit, decided I would be all right, and went back to bed.
C. exilicauda stings do occasionally kill someone, but usually you have to be pretty messed up already, as in having a bad heart condition, or very small. This sting did not kill me, but it did whack my sympathetic nervous system some, and of course that's self-reinforcing when you're freaked out about having been stung by one of the scorpion species in the USA with the most toxic venom to humans. Kind of like almost being run over by a truck on your bicycle right when the LSD kicks in (this has not happened to me, but I can think about what it might be like).
I got over it, but then a few days later, somebody wanted to buy some bark scorpions, so they were on my packing list early one Monday morning. I had a bunch of critters to chase around and herd into cups, mostly tarantulas. I had made a commitment to do this. Timing is important with live animals; most of these little guys were going via overnight or second day freight, and the recipients want to be prepared to take some time getting their new pets in order soon as they arrive.
At this point, I'd taped up the holes in the bark scorpion shoebox holes. I had some sticks in there for them to climb on. One of them was cleverly hiding on the underside of the stick...and they got me again.
Meanwhile, I'd talked to one of our scorpion expert members, who had pointed out that if you stick the offended digit in gasoline, it will stop the pain from the sting. I did, and this worked. For the pain, at least. However, I still got to wrangle quite a few critters into dampened paper towel lined cups over the space of an hour or so, and otherwise pack and label the boxes, while under the influence of bark scorpion venom.
I handled it well, though not happily, and not without a certain amount of vocalizing. It did make me think about things I'd read in the 60's about the importance of being able to maintain on acid...i.e., to be able to manage anything you would otherwise be doing, while under a highly altered state of consciousness. Good thing I'd had practice.
Spiders were easy by comparison. The worst thing that would happen with the tarantulas was a big one getting loose and jumping off the table and going splat. That was always painful and upsetting.
The widows were a piece of cake. At one point I had the Merck corporation offering to buy them from me in bulk, for antivenin purposes. That seemed too complicated to me, and besides they milk venom from them with electric shocks, which seems unkind, even for a spider.
Those scorpions were sneaky, though. The other critters that bothered me were the Scolopendra centipedes, the big ones we have locally. Beautiful critters, go to about ten inches, orange and black. They were in big demand; I could get $35 apiece for them.
None of them ever got me, but they freaked me out more than any spider ever did. The way they move, the way they still writhe around and stand up and try to get you even after you've put them in the refrigerator for half an hour to calm them down. (last ditch way to slow any arthropod down; I usually did not revert to this, being an arthropod packer of some style).
Only other arachnid that ever nailed me was an adult male Chilean rose tarantula. I was used to handling the gentler tarantulas, and I was busy online trying to explain to somebody how to sex tarantulas. I kept taking the fellow out of his cage, looking at his parts in order to describe them more properly, and then setting him back down again. After about the fourth round of this, he tired of this exercise, and slowly and methodically sank his fangs into my left index finger.
I watched this behavior with some disbelief. "Why, you little so-and-so," I said, in so many words, and dropped him back into his cage.
My finger itched a lot and swelled up a little, but it was no big deal.
The worst insect stings I've gotten have been from harvester ants and "tarantula hawks." Wasps in Pepsis and Hemipepsis (unless this has changed) are roughly referred to as tarantula hawks, because they parasitize and paralyze tarantulas and use the animals to feed their larvae.
Shortly after I started rooming with Spider Bob, we found many of them swarming a bush outside our house, feeding on the nectar. SB instructed me to kill them, because they were terrible tarantula-unfriendly critters and thus deserved to die. He instructed me to capture them with a net and freeze them, for posterity.
For some reason, it didn't occur to me that they might sting me, and I did this bare-handed until after a few dozen or so, one of the females got me.
Now that hurt. Bad swelling and bad pain. Lasted for a few days.
Harvester ant stings are bad too, but I have learned to trust them and walk barefoot amid them, though I always look down. Like Polistes wasps, these people just about never will hurt me if I don't hurt them.
It always helps, though, not to bump into any of these folks in the dark. We all have our limits.