211–220 of 251 posts
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…
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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 aft…
The average bee has no reason to ever fight a mammal. Optimizing for a rare event like that makes no sense. It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has become a frequent occurrence.
Surviving attacks against humans that help you survive is a really strange priority.
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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”.
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Why does she go out to mate? Aren't the drones in the hive?
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.
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Wasp bites are a lot more painful than mosquito bites.
Mosquito bites are not painful at all to me. I've been stung by a bee only once, and it wasn't particularly painful (but not nothing, of course). As I mentioned above, I've been stung by swarms of wasps twice and it was very painful. I hear yellowjacket stings are extremely painful, but even though I've been near them I've never been stung... fortunately.
interesting. I had a friend who was like that. once he invited me to a jazz concert near a river in the city where we both lived. river = mosquitoes. it was around 7 to 8 p.m. there was a shitload of mosquitoes around, and they were biting me and other people like mad, but he seemed completely unaffected. I asked him, aren't you being troubled by them? he said no.
I had had enough, and ran away from both the concert and those mosquitoes.
I have been stung by wasps a few times, and it is a lot more painful than a mosquito bite.
yellowjacket seems to be an American term. I had to look it up.
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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 aft…
I'm not sure why this answer is buried down so deep. It should be pretty obvious. The average bee has no reason to ever fight a mammal. Optimizing for a rare event like that makes no sense. It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has become a frequent occurrence. Surviving attacks against humans that help you survive is a really strange priority.
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…
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.
Or are incapable of studying/reflecting in depth.
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>The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens I think this is one of the more interesting differences. Plenty of species operate in groups. But its usually a dominant male with a harem. Bees and the like are unusual in that it's a dominant female. I think it's related to the ease of reproduction. The females put relatively little into their off spring compared…
There are bees that are monogamous, where the female and the male act a lot more like birds as far as mating and young rearing goes, and there are eusocial bees that where the female absolutely dominates. Honeybees keep very few males (drones) around, and in the Fall they push them out of the hive and let them die of exposure to the elements. Honeybee workers work themselves to death. The queen is their slave. It's a…
If we judged ourselves by the cells in our body, we’d probably conclude that humans aren’t “happy.”
White blood cells basically run suicide missions against intruders, so they are sort of like swarming worker bees.
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…
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 locati…
I had a friend, when I was a kid, that shot a white-faced hornet nest (not actually hornets -they are big yellowjackets -even worse) with a BB gun, from, like, 50 meters away.
The hornets figured out who shot their nest, and swarmed him. May have just been that they attacked any nearby critters, but he certainly paid for his folly.
White-faced hornets are better to have in your yard, than yellowjackets. They are a lot less aggressive, only attacking if their nest is at risk. They also eat yellowjackets, so you have hornets or yellowjackets, but not both.
Here’s a video of a guy filming himself being stung by a bee, then watching as the bee spins around, works its stinger loose, and flies away: