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Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

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Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#101

Post by tsimionescu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #98
kevinventullo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding from the article and the general theory of Superorganisms is that it’s not exactly true that “dying when stinging confers fitness”. Rather, dying when stinging is just not a huge penalty when you’re talking about non-reproducing members of a colony. So, while it may be a good thing for bees to evolve the ability to survive stinging, the selective pressure is not as large as one might intuitively expe…

Well, there's a larger problem in the post. The primary reason that a bee dies when it stings you is that you kill the bee. A bee stinging an inanimate hunk of meat is unlikely to die. But they can die, and yeah, a big part of the reason why is that dying isn't as large of a cost for bees as you might expect from a human perspective. And looping back, another part is that given the very high risk of being intentional…

Per everything I've ever read on this, a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive. It will either try to pull itself out and disembowel itself, or it will remain stack and die of hunger. What makes you think a bee that stings, say, a dog that can't swat it will then go on to survive?

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#102

Post by autoexec »

_1tem wrote: post #85
notRobot wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was random, and it survived . Every single part of an organism goes through a recombination/mutation process countless times, the stinger evolved to be what it is today over a very long time and it's cool to study why it ended up the way it did. Tells us about their environment and history and evolutionary pressures, survival is a result of the random traits being successful in their context in specific ways.

Still doesn’t explain why other species in the same context survived without it or with an opposite trait.

Why shouldn't different or even "opposite" traits also be successful? When faced with random inheritable differences across different species over long periods of time why wouldn't the result be a variety of them, every one of which just didn't prevent reproduction from passing those traits on to the next generation? Some traits might be seen as "better" or "worse" by comparison but as long as they get passed on, we'll see both. It isn't about being "best". It's about being "good enough"

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#103

Post by dwattttt »

glenstein wrote: post #90
jstanley wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you could encounter absolutely any organism and make the same argument. There is no configuration of organism that would cause you to say "huh, I guess Survival doesn't depend on Fitness after all!" Because it takes the observation of Survival and uses it to infer Fitness, at the same time as saying that Fitness confers Survival.

>Because you could encounter absolutely any organism and make the same argument. That's a function of the explanation being an extremely good explanation. It rises to the top precisely because it has explanatory power all across nature without evident counter-example. >There is no configuration of organism that would cause you to say "huh, I guess Survival doesn't depend on Fitness after all!" This is where the argum…

Translating the word Fitness from a term of art makes this very clear: if you said "good enough to survive", no one would question the statement "I wonder why they survive. Guess they must be 'good enough to survive'".

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#104

Post by wruza »

_1tem wrote: post #43

I don't understand why any "why" question in evolutionary biology is ever satisfied with a "survival of the fittest" truism. Any evolutionary explanation you give me is also falsified by the existence of another species with a different/opposite trait. Whatever explanation you give for a bee's barbed stinger is falsified by the wasp's non-barbed one. Also doesn't answer other questions, such as why didn't bees evolve…

Imagine taking your favorite fractal and picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Would you be better satisfied by or by specific step by step calculations that lead to that neighborhood?

Either way, now imagine taking not your favorite, irregular, non-describable, non-computable, enormously complex processes-driven fractal that is the real nature, then picking a random point in one of its non-trivial regions, trying to explain what happens there. Now ask yourself the same question and what comes to mind.

More short analogy would be that biology is physics with all elementary particles being different.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#105

Post by harimau777 »

Am I the only one who grew up with bees dying after stinging carrying a sort of unspoken significance or meaning?

I don't think I ever heard someone actually state it, but growing up I had the feeling that bees dying when they sting you was in some sense "significant" because it meant that bees had to be selective in when they chose to resort to violence.

It was almost like an unspoken fable or illustration about the importance of controlling aggression.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#106

Post by raincole »

_1tem wrote: post #43

I don't understand why any "why" question in evolutionary biology is ever satisfied with a "survival of the fittest" truism. Any evolutionary explanation you give me is also falsified by the existence of another species with a different/opposite trait. Whatever explanation you give for a bee's barbed stinger is falsified by the wasp's non-barbed one. Also doesn't answer other questions, such as why didn't bees evolve…

I think you misunderstood what people mean by "why" in the context of evolution.

For example, you ask a random person what his job is.

He: I fix TVs

You: Why?

He: Uh, that's what keeps a roof over me and keeps my family fed?

You: But clearly other humans do other jobs and still have roofs. So it's not a real "why". Your statement is falsified.

> Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" things are the way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion

How DNA works at molecular level is science. How creators became what they are now is history. History usually doesn't have the same level of falsifiability as science does.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#108

Post by idatum »

ahazred8ta wrote: post #12
redundantly wrote: post #4

The next time my wife asks me why we have something new, my response will be "Because in a capitalistic society, you can exchange money for ____."

There are many valid explanations. https://www.ft.com/lol-404-theories

This link is awesome. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#109

Post by cryptonector »

Honeybee queens are the only honeybees with stingers that don't die when they sting. That's because the queen bee's stinger has no barbs, and the reason for that is that the queen must not die easily, and she must use her stinger, so if she's going to survive at all her stinger has to not have barbs. The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens that are about to hatch or have hatched already. She also has to possibly use her stinger when she goes out to mate (though she does go with attendants who will defend her if attacked).

I was surprised not to find mention of this in TFA.

> A honey bee dies when it stings you because its stinger is covered in barbs, causing its abdomen to get ripped out when it tries to fly away. And surviving with your guts spilling out everywhere is pretty bloody hard.

There's another interesting detail here: when the worker tries to fly off after stinging, she has to try really hard because the barbs hold the stinger in place, and trying hard causes two things to happen:

  - noise that attracts other workers
    to attack the same creature
  
  - spreading of the dying bee's
    distress pheromones that also
    attract other workers to sting
    the same creature
So when you get stung by a bee near other bees you will be in trouble. That's how you go from one sting to hundreds. And hundreds is enough to kill a human. That's why you don't go near a hive without protection. Being in or near a swarm is safer than being near a hive: the bees in a swarm don't have much (larvae, honey) to protect, so they don't attack.

Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

#110

Post by jpeloquin »

prerok wrote: post #96
jpeloquin wrote: post #74

The concept of indirect fitness must be more complicated than explained here. The article explains it as a worker bee sharing 75% of her genes with her sisters, but only 50% with a child, so there is selection pressure for workers to be sterile and self-sacrificing. But few genes actually differ between individuals, so the percentages are much higher. E.g., I share ~ 99% of my genes with each one of you reading this.…

Hmm, I understand this difference in genes differently. You and I probably share 99% of effective genes, but still the difference in genes is much greater because there we are comparing the entire DNA. There is a lot of non-affecting DNA. And that is what they analyze when comparing DNA of two individuals in forensics.

Based on the information I found, the % difference between two randoms humans in terms of base pairs (including non-coding DNA) is even less than the difference in terms of genes, so the distinction does not materially alter the discussion. Also the article framed its explanation in terms of genes, not base pair sequence.

"Between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation—biochemical individuality—is about .1 percent." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20363/

https://book.bionumbers.org/how-genetically-similar-are-two-...

Forensic comparisons are mostly about comparing the number of short tandem repeats at handful of loci, a very small part of the the whole genome.

If you have any information that indicates the DNA similarity between people is less than 98–99% I would love to hear it. I have not personally analyzed the sequences from the 1000 genome project to check, and am relying on summaries written by other people.

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