Remember The Time Hamish Blake Shoved His Hand Into A Glove Full Of Venomous Ants For A Laugh?
Bullet ant stings are 30 times more painful than that of a bee – and Hamish was stung over a hundred times in the first second.
I want you to cast your mind back to 2014. A time when Marlon Wayans posted about Delta Goodrem’s very bad dance moves, Coldplay was randomly marching through the streets of Newtown and Schapelle Corby was finally released from prison. That same year, Hamish and Andy were truly dominating Aussie TV.
Following on from the massive success of their regular Rove Live segment — which featured classic bits like ‘Freeating’ for an entire week and going on a 42-hour back-to-back party marathon — Hamish Blake and Andy Lee found real momentum with their travel specials.
Kicking off in 2009 with Hamish & Andy’s American Caravan of Courage, Hamish and Andy produced a number of one-off specials and travel series that saw the comedy duo jet-setting across the world to do some truly wild things.
For example, on Euro Gap Year we witnessed Hamish painfully down Germany’s spiciest sausage, while Andy had to hold back his vomit as he was forced to chomp on the Swedish delicacy, surströmming AKA rotten fish. Meanwhile, on Gap Year South America, we watched the boys climb up Pacaya in Guatemala to make “lavasagna” — a lasagna cooked on lava at an active volcano. Totally normal, and safe, stuff.
But even though the duo literally scaled a volcano to cook pasta, that’s somehow still not the wildest thing they’ve done over the years. No, the craziest thing Hamish and Andy have ever done was undoubtedly the glove filled with bullet ants.
In case you’ve somehow cleared the scene from your mind, in the segment aptly titled ‘Worst Pain Known To Man’, Hamish experienced the Amazon’s Sateré-Mawé tribe’s coming-of-age ritual that sees young men put on gloves filled with venomous bullet ants for 10 minutes to become a true warrior.
While an ant sting doesn’t sound too bad, the bullet ant sting is said to “feel like getting shot” and is about 30 times more painful than that of a bee, according to National Geographic. But thankfully for Hamish, the sting is not deadly and pain usually subsides after a very, very, VERY painful 24 hours — as we saw him discover with his own experience.
Visibly in pain as soon as the gloves were placed on his hands, Hamish screamed in agony and begged for them to be taken off after being stung at least 100 times in the first few seconds. And after trying to literally dance the pain away as per tradition while Andy threw some jokes Hamish’s way, the gravity of the situation really set in.
Following two hours of tears and sweat streaming down his face as his hands violently shook, Hamish finally threw in the towel and was sent to the hospital. The issue? The hospital was literally a whole hour away.
But thanks to the help of morphine, Hamish was able to get discharged after seven hours on a drip and headed to Macca’s right after to celebrate his survival in true Aussie fashion.
View this post on Instagram
Speaking about the incident five years later on Triple M in 2019, Hamish Blake called his bullet ant experience a case of “misplaced confidence” because he genuinely thought it would take “a minute” to get “one bite” from an ant. Instead, he was stung over a hundred times in the first second, which really did foil the boy’s plans to have “beers in the pool around 6pm” that same day.
Now everyone say thank you to Hamish Blake for sacrificing his hands and pool beers to give us this moment that will go down as one of the Top 10 biggest regrets ever caught on camera.