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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)

#171

Post by cryptonector »

ternnoburn wrote: post #170
cryptonector wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drones in the hive are her brothers. She needs more gentic diversity, so she goes out to mate with other colonies' drones. Her attendants know where to go find them because they've scouted them before.

The drones are also clones (?) of the prior queen. They are unfertilized eggs, so they contain a genetic copy of half the queen's DNA. Mating with a drone from you hive would be like mating directly with your genetic mother. It's going to result in real bad inbreeding real quickly. Especially since queens mate a single time, and live for only a few years.

They're like half-clones, yeah. Queens can mate more than once though, but usually just once, and if more than once just twice. A well-mated queen will have sperm from a dozen different drones.

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

#172

Post by thaumasiotes »

cryptonector wrote: post #169
thaumasiotes wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching a youtube video by a beekeeper demonstrating that a bee stuck in his arm will gently wiggle itself around until it can pull free and fly away. Between that one guy with his live demonstration and his plentiful experience being stung by bees, and you with everything you've ever read, I'm obviously going to stick with him. You should read better sources. Here, an example of how bees behave after stinging meat:…

Not at all my experience. My Italian bees are pretty hot though, so that may be why. My Russian bees are much nicer, and I've never been even stung by one of them, so maybe that's it. My hot bees will rip their stinger out within a second, and they emit a very particular frequency that I feel and that lets me know very quickly that I'm in trouble -- to be fair I've only experienced that vibration a handful of times b…

Does any of that support the idea that "a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive"?

This is clearly false. Why repeat it?

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

#173

Post by darkerside »

jstanley wrote: post #57
sedatk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasps and bees have different ecological constraints with different risks involved. There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive. Evolution doesn’t have any goals or agenda. That’s why whales still have vestigial hip bones despite…

I think this is a perfect example of what your parent comment is talking about, being: > unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion. You said: > There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive. Sure,…

This assumes that Fitness is a meaningless aphorism. I would posit that Fitness is a meaningful concept that can be learned. It is defined by what happens to be reproductively helpful to a species, which is tautological, but to understand the definition, it just means you need to understand that particular species ecosystem and lifecycle.

If you really analyze any word, it loses all meaning except what we've assigned it.

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

#174

Post by cryptonector »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #172
cryptonector wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all my experience. My Italian bees are pretty hot though, so that may be why. My Russian bees are much nicer, and I've never been even stung by one of them, so maybe that's it. My hot bees will rip their stinger out within a second, and they emit a very particular frequency that I feel and that lets me know very quickly that I'm in trouble -- to be fair I've only experienced that vibration a handful of times b…

Does any of that support the idea that "a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive"? This is clearly false. Why repeat it?

The ones that manage to leave the stinger in never survive in my case. Idk what to tell you. That's just my experience. Can they survive? Yes, they can. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? No, I don't think so.

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

#175

Post by qup »

867-5309 wrote: post #120
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're careful with the index fingers of opposite hands, you can remove the stinger from your skin without killing the bee.

as opposed to index fingers of the same hand..

Not the same hand, he's talking about two hands on the same side

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

#176

Post by lisper »

> The haplodiploidy hypothesis, though nice, is not without its problems. Firstly, there are plenty of species with haplodiploid genetics which do not form eusocial colonies.

That is not a problem. Reproductive fitness must always be measured relative to an environment. Just because colony life is a successful strategy for haplodiploid species in some environments does not mean it will be a successful strategy in all environments. You can see this in other species. Female lions live mostly in cooperative groups while male lions and all other large cats (leopards, cheetahs, and tigers) are solitary.

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

#177

Post by jpeloquin »

GuB-42 wrote: post #151
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.…

It doesn't matter how much bees have in common. The idea is that in bees, altruistic traits, that is those that produce more sisters by helping the queen have a 75% chance of being passed, because sisters share 75% of a worker bee genes. Most of the genes are the same, of course, bees won't become dogs or anything like that, but a few of them differ, and these are the one that matter. Could worker bees be fertile and…

Right, "sharing" here must mean DNA that was cloned from the same ancestral DNA strand, not merely that it shares the same informational content. I got lost in the analogies that frame things in terms of what's "better" for the organism and lost sight of this.

The most important thing from the perspective of replication of a DNA strand is the number of copies of DNA passed to the next generation, and future generations, right? Which would be 0.75 * (mean marginal increase in next-generation sisters) + 0.5 * (mean # offspring). The probability that these next-generation individuals actually get to reproduce in turn would also factor in somewhere.

What's also interesting is that if we take the point of view of the queen (through whom the altruistic genes must pass), the queen's reproductive strategy is relatively few children + hordes of sterile helpers + killing her own sisters. So are we talking about a fitness advantage of altruistic traits (maximizing # sisters), or a fitness advantage from selfish traits [maximizing P(fertile child survival) I guess, since # children is small] that produce hordes of sterile helpers?

Edit: Circling back to the organism perspective, in the sense of "I would gladly give up my life for two brothers or eight cousins.", how many bees is it worth giving up one's own life for in that specific sense? We do have a common ancestor after all and thus a non-zero R-factor.

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

#178

Post by nejsjsjsbsb »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #113
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…

Useful reminder nature is terrifying even at its smallest. I'm a little surprised this wasn't taught to me in school.

Yeah: caterpillar parasites

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

#179

Post by nejsjsjsbsb »

_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 have a personal theory that genetics and survival just need to be good enough. They may find other local maxima and improve things. But they don't need to be perfect in every dimension. There is room for stuff that doesn't make sense to human logic. In addition because species don't generally breed with other species you need to find those optimisations through chance within a species. And genes are not a feature list. Turn one gene on and something else may turn off. There are trade off too.
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