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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)

#121

Post by cryptonector »

teeray wrote: post #117
cryptonector wrote: post #109

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…

The queen bee is a formidable final boss with a bad-ass origin story.

She's also her daughters' slave. They make her work (lay eggs). They decide when to make new queens. They decide when to swarm with the old queen, and when they do they put her on a diet first so she can lose weight so she can fly (they won't let her eat much for two weeks), and they'll push her out of the hive when the time comes.

Humans only really get stung by queen honeybees when manipulating them. Normally the queen will be inside the hive and stay inside the hive except once or twice early in her life when she goes out to mate.

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

#122

Post by newsuser »

bornfreddy wrote: post #83
johndhi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love this comment. It highlights a major misunderstanding of biology that many people who didn't study it in depth have: that every, or most features of living beings do not have an "evolutionary explanation." T-rex arms aren't short so they can open flowers - they just happen to be small because that's the type of creature that happened to survive after a lot of changes.

Maybe this explains why humans are snoring? It just wasn't / isn't evolutionary important.

Most likely, yes, like the loudness of baby crying. Humans are pack animals so any predator attracted by snoring or baby cry, and deciding to check it out would be in a very very big trouble.

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

#123

Post by cryptonector »

ianbicking wrote: post #119
cryptonector wrote: post #109

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…

This maybe points to another theory (which may be entirely wrong, I'm just guessing!): honeybees die because they aren't supposed to attack each other. Like they can't be aggressively selfish because they'll just die in the process.

Honeybees do attack other colonies' honeybees. Africanized honeybees definitely do it. As someone else points out the barbs don't get stuck in insects, but do get stuck in mammals (and presumably birds too?).

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

#124

Post by cryptonector »

ec109685 wrote: post #52
lysace wrote: post #35

A random bee sting in class was the straw that broke my back in a mid 90s multivariable calculus lecture at a Swedish university where I was studying CS/EE. It lead to me dropping out. Went to a local internet/web software startup instead and a whole new world opened up. Yes, I had been behind. I'm doing OK now :)

The gate keeping of all that calculus for a CS degree is silly. Wasn’t the strongest at math, so grinned and bared but don’t really have a grasp of it anymore, and it would have been a shame to not have graduated with a CS degree because of it.

It's "grin and bear", as in grinning while bearing the load. The past tense would be "grinned and bore". FYI.

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

#125

Post by cruftbox »

Hobby beekeeper here.

Worker bees dies when they sting a person, because the stinger and venom pump remain when they fly off, ripping their abdomen open.

The purpose of this is that the venom pump continues to function after they have left, making the sting as painful as possible.

Honeybees are a superorganism, where the survival of the colony supersedes the survival of any individual bee.

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

#126

Post by swyx »

lysace wrote: post #35

A random bee sting in class was the straw that broke my back in a mid 90s multivariable calculus lecture at a Swedish university where I was studying CS/EE. It lead to me dropping out. Went to a local internet/web software startup instead and a whole new world opened up. Yes, I had been behind. I'm doing OK now :)

basically you are Spiderman

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

#127

Post by labster »

_1tem wrote: post #111
glenstein wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> It probably feels like it proves too much, because it's confirmed over and over again in nature everywhere, at all times. No, logically it is proved true because it is assumed to be true and then used to prove itself. > For starters, species go extinct all the time for reasons tied to their evolutionary trajectory. Again, this is circular logic. You assumed that the only reason that species go extinct is because it…

Actually your example of creationist species isn’t circular at all, it just has no predictive power. Unless you want to say that God really likes beetles, I suppose.

In the end evolution is random, but exerts some pressure towards fitness in some environments. Some traits are legacy or are just plain random; just because an organism has a trait does not mean it is useful now, or indeed has ever been useful for fitness. The whole package must be reasonably fit for some environment, but that doesn’t mean all the traits improve fitness.

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

#130

Post by harimau777 »

ianbicking wrote: post #118
harimau777 wrote: post #105

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…

It points to another evolutionary pressure that isn't mentioned as often: if an animal is too aggressive humans will exterminate it.

I had this experience with a wasp nest near my house. I figured "live and let live" until one day I walked out my door and a wasp flew directly over and stung me without provocation. So I got some insecticide and got rid of the nest.
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