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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)

#201

Post by EdwardDiego »

derektank wrote: post #27
WalterBright wrote: post #17

Why do humans live long enough to be grandparents? It's because grandparents take care of the grandkids while the parents work.

I find the grandparents hypothesis compelling at first glance but it sort of begs the question, why don't we live indefinitely in the first place? There are obvious answers, we make tradeoffs to improve performance early in life at the expense of long term function, but it doesn't seem like the reproductive benefits of caring for a grandchild that only shares a 1/4 of your DNA necessarily tips the scales of selection…

Obviously because Tree-of-Life didn't survive on Earth, so we could never achieve our final form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector

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

#203

Post by WaitWaitWha »

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…

Nice, another beek!

I have had a hive where I had queens that lived quite fine together. Weirdest hive as one of them was a caucasia and the other a cordovan. Never did get stung with those ladies.

Mine was by accident, but I hear that some beeks do it since cannot get the genetic combination, they just do it as a mechanical combo, to get preferred traits. Like buckfast and russian to help with swarming and defensiveness.

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

#204

Post by kevinventullo »

tsimionescu wrote: post #99
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…

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

I don’t know where you got that. It seems perfectly plausible that the stingers evolved in the superorganism, and that the selective pressure was something like “drones protect the hive via stingers which kill them” versus “drones can’t sting at all”.

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

#206

Post by JohnHaugeland »

For the record, almost no bees die when they sting you. This is just a weird myth that people repeat nonstop.

This only happens to honeybees, and only when they're stinging humans. Most skin is much thicker than ours, more similar to our feet callouses. The stinger isn't supposed to go in. That's closer to a sword's foil.

The reason they panic when it happens is it's not supposed to happen.

The stingers are mostly meant for combat with other insects. You can watch these fights on youtube. They never, ever end with the bee self eviscerating.

This is a simple example of people trying to look smart by explaining things which, when you check, just aren't true.

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

#207

Post by prerok »

jpeloquin wrote: post #110
prerok wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I see, thank you for the explanation!

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

#208

Post by thowawatp302 »

_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…

This whole line of argument from the parent comment and its ancestor seems to ignore we can see where certain evolutionary features reach local minima, like the retina of the human eye. It’s obviously not the fittest thing wrt the octopus retina, but does well enough you can read this.

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

#209

Post by ErigmolCt »

Isn’t that just so unbearably sad? These little creatures work tirelessly their whole lives, buzzing from flower to flower, pollinating the plants that sustain ecosystems and our food supply. They barely get to live a few weeks as worker bees, and then if they ever need to sting to protect their hive... that’s it. Their life ends in an act of ultimate devotion.

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

#210

Post by ErigmolCt »

spqr0a1 wrote: post #19

While 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.

Nature’s design is often elegant. But also (sometimes) cruel.
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