Kind of got me thinking is there any tool or is someone working on something that can parse a DNA and give you the end result for any species? If not what's the main challenge
Would be a cool challenge for all the quantum supremacy folk
Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
141–150 of 251 posts
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 q…
Why does she go out to mate? Aren't the drones in the hive?
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#143Stepping back a little and try to projecting that logic onto humans, are we more like super organisms? Interestingly, Our social constructs does have similarities of both superorganism and non- superorganism
It's even more extreme than that. If you took a random sampling of humans to a version of Earth that had never experienced humans, it would not go well. We're heavily dependant on society and modern technology. We've evolved together.
E.g. smaller birth canals and C-sections.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#144Honeybee 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 bees in a swarm have filled themselves with food before swarming, so they’re stuffed, so it’s hard to flex the abdomen to make a sting
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#145A 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
Huh. How about that.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> totally circular reasoning that could be used to prove anything. No, you can attack the reasoning by looking into actual costs. It seems like it can explain anything because we don’t constantly see examples where it’s false. Looking at the costs to bees you see what percentage of them die from attacking mammal flesh and yep it’s a tiny rounding error. Hypothetically, in a world without constraints mice could have a…
> Hypothetically, in a world without constraints mice could have a 100 foot long teeth Oh boy, today's the day you learn something new about rodents.
What, the fact that their teeth can grow so long that they'll circle around and stab their brains?
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#147Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#148I 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…
Why did the spaghetti monster give bee srings barbs?
Because the bees prayed for protection and got saucy about it.
Is that better? Are you really looking for equivalence? Is that fit enough?
Instead of spreading evolution FUD, there are many0laces you could educate yourself. S9meone with a HN acvount is more than able to seek these out. Therefore your motives for this comment seen more disingenuous.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#149Honeybee 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…
Very interesting!
Don't wasps have a similar "swarm attack" mode that doesn't require individual wasps dying to spread pheromones? Something in the sting/venom itself?
I've been stung by wasp swarms twice, in the same area (they were protecting their nest, and please don't ask why it happened twice... we humans do indeed stumble with the same stone twice!). The wasps were very aggressive stinging near the same location in my arm, and it hurt a lot. I was stung in the same body part by the swarm, not in random locations.
No wasps were harmed during this accident.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#150Honeybee 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…
> 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
But in this particular case the queen is no different from worker bees, right? They wouldn't die either from stinging other bees...