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Bullet Ant Gloves

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Hamish Blake once let a glove full of bullet ants sting him for television, and it took eight hours before he could speak properly again.

The finale of Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year South America, which aired in August 2014, sent Australian comedian Hamish Blake into the Brazilian Amazon to take part in a real Sateré-Mawé initiation rite — the bullet ant glove. It’s one of the more extreme traditions practiced by an indigenous tribe still in use, and Blake, never one to back down from a dare on his own show, agreed to try it on camera alongside co-host Andy Lee.

• Blake wore palm-frond gloves woven with dozens of live bullet ants (Paraponera clavata), whose sting tops the Schmidt Sting Pain Index — the standard researchers use to rank insect stings by agony.
• Tradition calls for initiates to keep their hands in the gloves for up to ten minutes without flinching; Blake pulled his out after only seconds.
• He was rushed to a hospital in Manaus with shaking, heavy sweating, nausea and severe swelling, and didn’t speak again for roughly eight hours.

The Ritual Behind the Stunt

The bullet ant glove is a genuine Sateré-Mawé rite of passage, not a stunt invented for television. Young men of the tribe weave the ants into gloves made from woven leaves, stingers turned inward, and wear them repeatedly over months as a test of endurance tied to becoming a warrior. Production for Gap Year South America arranged for Blake to undergo an abbreviated version of the same ceremony, with tribal elders overseeing the process the way they would for one of their own initiates.

The bullet ant earns its name because victims consistently describe the sting as feeling like being shot. That reputation is well documented among entomologists studying the Amazon’s most dangerous wildlife — the kind of extreme creature encounter that also shows up in the world’s most extreme wild animal battles — and it’s exactly why the ritual is treated as a genuine test rather than a gimmick.

Seconds In, Not Minutes

Where Sateré-Mawé initiates are expected to endure roughly ten minutes of continuous stinging without showing pain, Blake lasted only a matter of seconds before yanking his hands free. The neurotoxic venom went to work immediately, triggering uncontrollable shaking, intense sweating and nausea, along with swelling so severe his hands ballooned well past their normal size.

Twenty-four hours later, Blake wrote that he still gave the ants “no thumbs up (even if I could move my thumbs).”

The comment captured the tone of the whole segment — genuine physical distress played for laughs after the fact, once he was actually able to move again.

Eight Hours Before He Could Speak

The stunt wasn’t a bit that wrapped once the cameras stopped rolling. Blake was taken to a hospital in Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, for treatment as the venom’s effects peaked. By his own account, it took about eight hours of debilitating pain before he was able to speak again, a detail that separated this segment from the usual physical-comedy stunts Hamish & Andy built their travel series around. The swelling itself came with one silver lining Blake pointed out afterward: there was no danger of his wedding ring slipping off, given how tight his hands had become.

Traditions like this one — practices tied to endurance, status and community standing among indigenous groups — sit alongside other documented feats explored in coverage of tribes whose customs appear to violate ordinary physical limits, underscoring just how far the Sateré-Mawé ritual sits from anything typically asked of a visiting entertainer.

The finale closed out the season as the show’s most talked-about physical segment, and it’s the one clip from Gap Year South America that fans still bring up years later — Blake in visible agony, hands swollen and shaking, insisting through gritted teeth that he was fine, while Andy Lee narrated the whole thing from a safe distance.