Earlier quoted context omitted.
as opposed to index fingers of the same hand..
Not the same hand, he's talking about two hands on the same side
but I need my second left hand to film for Insta! :-P
Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
191–200 of 251 posts
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?).
Checked them. Found: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee
> Africanized honey bees are typically much more defensive, react to disturbances faster, and chase people further (400 metres (1,300 ft)) than other varieties of honey bees.
My bees will chase me about 200 yards, and probably more if I had to go further to go inside a building (they don't like dark places). They lay ambushes, too. They'll wait outside the building I go into and will attack again if I go out.
Well, they used to anyways. Since switching to top-bar hive bodies they're much nicer.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting. I'm not at all sure this is true - I don't know the evolutionary history of bees, but it seems unlikely that some kind of solitary proto-bees would have died after a sting. An…
> This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting. I don't see how you arrived at this conclusion, this logic seems to be flawed. Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cho…
> Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it.
If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in some individual bees, but many other bees didn't have them, like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then I'd agree.
But a trait can't be universal in a species, and even in many related species, unless there is explicit selective pressure for that trait, or if it's a remnant from a common ancestor that had it. Your high cholesterol predisposition example is actually perfect, it shows what happens with traits that don't have significant pressure for or against them: they remain confined to a subset of the population.
> Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are.
They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the organism still viable is extremely low.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting. I'm not at all sure this is true - I don't know the evolutionary history of bees, but it seems unlikely that some kind of solitary proto-bees would have died after a sting. An…
> "It's not a big disadvantage to survival" can't be the explanation for a trait Why not? Honest question. Intuitively, I'd say that there are plenty of traits that propagate as long as they aren't expensive in terms of genetic survival. It's the nature of random genetic mutation, random traits will develop and some of them won't really affect survival and may propagate.
Yes, traits can propagate even if there is no selective pressure for them. But they won't reach 100% of the species, even less so 100% of several geographically separated species (such as African and European bees) just because they aren't that bad. Could we contrive a story where it could be possible something like this does happen? Sure, but it would be very unlikely (basically, it would require only a small population that happened to have this minor handicap to have randomly survived some mass extinction event that killed off the entirety of the rest of the species).
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#195Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#196Honeybee 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…
BTW, when I get stung, if the stinger doesn't get stuck I sometimes don't even notice till much later -- this happens when I get stung through my gloves. If the stinger does get stuck in my skin the first thing I notice is the buzzing of the bee that stung me. The frequency of the buzzing of the bee that stung me and that is trying to rip off the stinger is absolutely terrifying because I know what comes next: a doze…
Why are bee stings such a common occurance to you? Are you a beekeeper?
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#197Earlier 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.
Because the trait is not the end all be all. It's a random walk to an outcome that leads to enough offspring to survive for the species to be there at all. It's probably not even the most optimal solution whatever is there, just happens to be competitive among the rest of the ecology to not be snuffed out.
You might be interested in this concept:
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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:…
Here is an example of a bee disemboweling itself:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/u9YDf9w6Ps8
Here is another one:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fMxZ4vKmOZo
So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written?
For example, this article interviews two bee scientists that confirm that the majority of honeybees die via self-disembowelment after stinging a human:
https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-die-after-stinging
However, they mention an interesting other thing, that may actually help explain what happens much better: bees don't die when they sting other insects or spiders, they only die when their needles get stuck in our thick skin. So perhaps the most likely explanation for the evolution and survival of the barbed stinger trait is that it's beneficial when bees fight their common enemies, and that bees simply don't interact that much with mammals and their thick skins.
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#199While a bee stinger may get stuck in you, that's not so when stinging fellow insects. The barbs don't catch on an exoskeleton like they do for thick and elastic mammalian skin. An elegant way to deliver more venom to larger targets.
Yeah, I was hoping the article would mention this, but no dice. :(
Re: Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
#200Why do humans live long enough to be grandparents? It's because grandparents take care of the grandkids while the parents work.
There’s the historian factor as well. They’ve found that African Elephant populations are largely constrained by water availability. Creating artificial watering holes is helping restore elephant populations better than most other attempts. But the matriarch is typically one of the oldest female members of the group, and elephants remember watering holes that they haven’t visited since they were young. During a droug…
In Māori culture in NZ, tribal elders (kaumātua) function much the same, they are the keepers of knowledge, history and cultural practices for their group(s).
I suspect you'd find the same in many cultures that didn't have writing to transmit knowledge.
(There's also the aspect of "mana", a very hard word to translate, "face", "influence", "power" or "really respected" are good approximations.
A kaumātua with mana accords your group (iwi/tribe or hapu/sub-tribe) with their mana.
So, say your Granddad was a renowned warrior or diplomat, even though he's in his 80s, the respect his opponents developed for him still persists, and flows onto you.)