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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)

#61

Post by hinkley »

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.

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 drought they will check all of these secondary and tertiary water sources. If that elephant is killed by poachers, the herd may lose the last remaining record of water resources and suffer for it.

I also recall watching a documentary about a troupe of primates. They adopted a young male kicked out of another troupe. Nothing remarkable about him until, again, a drought year. Turns out not all knowledge of edible foods is instinctual. They discovered him eating a fruit none of the tribe had eaten before. When he didn’t die they all started eating it too.

So I think we underestimate the value of record keeping with respect to longevity and inter-group mixing. It’s not all genes and safety in numbers.

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

#62

Post by ch4s3 »

RangerScience wrote: post #47
_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…

Survival of the fittest is the flawed quote, usually used by those with supremacist conceptual frameworks (that there can be an objective “better”, etc). This shows up a lot in fiction, where the quote is used as justification for cruelty, atrocities, and the like. IMHO, the much better quote is: > It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most…

> It is the one that is most adaptable to change

That is what fit means.

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

#63

Post by lysace »

ec109685 wrote: post #52
lysace wrote: post #35

A 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 :)

The gate keeping of all that calculus for a CS degree is silly. Wasn’t the strongest at math, so grinned and bared but don’t really have a grasp of it anymore, and it would have been a shame to not have graduated with a CS degree because of it.

In Sweden it was a heritage from Ericsson. They needed/need engineers who knew that stuff. Supposedly. I should have picked something with less EE even though I also loved electronics.

It seems much better these days.

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

#64

Post by johndhi »

_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…

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.

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

#65

Post by Retric »

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,…

> 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 100 foot long teeth, but we don’t live in a world without constraints.

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

#66

Post by _1tem »

notRobot wrote: post #49
_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…

Here's an explanation of how this works: All creatures are very complicated. Thus reproduction doesn't produce perfect clones, "mutations" take place. This is largely because there are so many different ways to derive one individual out of two individuals' complex genitic material. This is all a feature. This is why individuals have unique characteristics. Think about how different humans are from each other, even th…

If your answer is "it's a random mutation" then that settles the "why" question permanently. Why all this idle speculation about bee's stingers, then? It was a random mutation, and it survived, done.

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

#67

Post by thrance »

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…

Members of some species take care of the children of others, as well as theirs (Orcas come to mind, humans too if course). There is an advantage in helping others with similar DNA than you, because they will reciprocate.

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

#69

Post by kevinventullo »

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,…

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 expect.

Maybe a better title for the post would be something like, “Isn’t it weird that bees die when they sting? Shouldn’t they have evolved away from that?”

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

#70

Post by iwontberude »

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,…

How is it circular to argue why one species would do better in an environment than another based on phenotype and the physical interactions it enables? It’s all relative to other species. As long as you understand that, there is no logical fallacy. I do very much appreciate the focus on informal logic though.
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