Why do bees die when they sting you?
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Weather or not what you are saying makes sense depends on the answer to these questions. But these questions are not in the field of game theory. These are questions of bee epidemiology really.
OK.
But why do bees die after stinging, but wasps don't.
From the hives perspective it’s a question of effectiveness vs the utility of individual bees remaining lifespan. Being even slightly more effective at discouraging mammals from raiding a hive for honey is presumably worth the loss of individual bees.
Wasps on the other hand lack the wealth of a bee hive so presumably different tradeoffs are worthwhile.
Bees need to defend themselves against other insects. The stinger doesn't detach when the threat isn't great enough to warrant suicide.
Also wasp nests aren't as hot and humid as bee hives
A rogue drone that can sting repeatedly is a huge risk to a hive since security screening is only enforced at entrance and the rogue one(s) are inside the hive. This way, with the one-shot stingers, the worst possible damage is the loss of another bee, and the problem drone has taken care of itself.
What's your take on that hypothesis?
Another point people are pointing out is that bees don't usually die after stinging other bee. Other bees are the easiest vectors for the infections I have had to deal with. I wonder what evolutionary advantage of not returning to the hive grants when a bee stings a larger animal (mammal, bird, etc).
Certainly attaching your venom pump to a mammal will help discourage it now and in the future. Given average bee lifetimes are 3-4 weeks anyway, it's also not much of a sacrifice for the hive.
The genetic similarly of bees to their queen is higher (75%) than most species, so kinship theory may point to less individualistic behavior as well.
https://www.lakeforest.edu/news/the-emerging-study-of-kinshi...
> Of course it is
That is incorrect. Diseases might evolve to be more infectious. This is not a certainty.
There are many directions a disease can change and selecting to be more likely for a specific species is dependent on an N-vector calculus, with the most impactful cofactors being the length of time they (an attacking bee and a pathogen and the bee victim) coexist in the same environments and the utility of such an adaptation and the nature of the disease (ie incubation time, effects, etc) over time. It's likely the nature of a specific disease and the victim are going to vary more over time, making a favorable situation to prevent any attacking bee to simply not return.
It's quite unlikely a bee could get infected by whatever a mammal is carrying.
And it would be easier to evolve "needle cleaning" (flushing acid over it for example).
https://cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/e/Evolutiona....
Wondering: 1. Do all bee species die after stinging? 2. Do bees always die? What's the mortality rate?
There may be plenty of diseases out there living off bees and other hosts, that are pervasive enough to provide sustained evolutionary pressure to facilitate this development.
We are not speculating on much here. Some others have mentioned the unit economics of losing single bees vs. Losing the whole hive are really excellent.
When bees sting other insects they can sting them multiple times, like a wasp. If you give them time a bee will usually be able to work it's stinger out of you and go on it's merry way. Their stingers just happen to get stuck in skin.
Here's a basic video discussing the topic: https://youtu.be/nTVsqc2CCGo
Though wasps don't need it and they are very effective at causing pain in mammals. The article mentions different evolutionary paths.
Or for that matter why would they evolve the barbed "fish hook" causing the stinger to stick in?
Evolution is not an intentional God. It does not have plans and it does not think. It is a randomized process in which not being disadvantage too much can make the trait survive.
Improbable things happen in practice. Just less often.
So yes, the trait has negligible impact on survival of the species and it is entirely plausible for them to survive despite the trait being super slight disadvantage.
Also, they did not "picked it". They are insects, they made no decision.
What you're talking about is a spandrel, and eusociality is not that. I'd recommend reading the article more closely. Much of it covers the evolution argument with depth and nuance – or at least more depth than I've seen in the HN comments section.
First of all, not all bee species even have stingers and only honeybees have barbed stingers. Even then, honeybees do not always die when stinging animals, such as insects, as only mammalian and maybe avian skin is thick enough to retain the barb.
Calling this suicide or a sacrifice seems to imply that the honeybee workers are aware of possible death when stinging a mammal, which I haven’t read evidence of, and I don’t think it’s something we have the ability to know. And honeybees only live a few months, so it’s a very human-centric viewpoint nonetheless.
Is it known whether this is an evolutionary strategy vs an evolutionary mistake? I suppose that isn’t really a question we can answer. The only thing I can think of is that mammals are larger and if the venom keeps pumping after the bee removes itself, then that would inject more venom. But for larger animals, is there a strong need for the bee to only be active in the sting temporarily? It seems a honeybee with a smooth barb could just sting a larger animal longer, removing the “need” (of the above hypothesis is true) of stinging for a short time but leaving the venom producing system behind.
> These altruistic acts are typically not done consciously, they have simple been formed by natural selection to act in this way. For instance, your neutrophils do not consciously commit suicide, they have just been shaped to do that by evolution. And of course you don't go out thinking "Hm yes I will save you two from drowning because you are each 5/8 related to me." Although maybe one biologist did actually think like this.
These altruistic acts are typically not done consciously, they have simple been formed by natural selection to act in this way.
Very simply, animals learn to avoid such insects. The same simple explanation - absent much of any concept of selfish or altruistic behavior - probably applies to bees as well, regardless of their colony structure. Once an animal is stung by a bee, it learns to avoid bees, which reduces predatory pressure on all bees (including bee mimic species).
The other primary role of the stinger is in defense of the hive, i.e. colony survival. That's a more direct group selection concept, as if the queen and some drones survive an attack on the colony, new generations can be bred, so an aggressive pheromone-trigger response by workers is likely.
Furthermore, one must always consider in evolution the role of accident and misfortune. For example, walking upright in humans is widely considered to have been a beneficial evolutionary development, as humans were able to spread onto the plains and were no longer limited to living in forests. So is the development of a large brain. However, together those factors make childbirth more difficult for human females relative to other mammals. This wasn't a desirable outcome, more of a side effect. Bee stingers lodging in some of their targets may be a similar issue - i.e. an accident of evolution, not something chosen by selection.
This is a pop science concept from the 60s known as the obstetrical dilemma and is not well-supported by the evidence we have.
Walking upright is still the strongest hypothesis for the difficult birth process.
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-have-figured-out-why-chi...
A “difficult birth process” has been played up in popular media. In the vast majority of cases, childbirth successfully exits a child, and also preserves the mother. There is some evidence that the mechanics of this process were better before early Western medicine’s gynecological “expertise”.
The whole thing stems from inaccurate, sexist attempts from the 20th century to explain why women are generally athletically not as capable as men.
Sounds logical and commonly beleived, however I had trouble finding any papers to actually support that humans have more maternal deaths.
A 2018 paper[1] says “The observations by Yeligulashvili, representing cumulative data on over 200 births spanning a 16 year period in the Sukhumi nursery, remain one of the largest reports documenting labor in NHP [non-human-primates]”. The paper about Baboons also said “there were 1021 cesarean deliveries, 5195 vaginal deliveries”, which either implies that the veterinarians are very often worried about the survival of the Baboon mother, or that the veterinarians perform cesarean deliveries for other reasons (like humans do).
There are strong evolutionary pressures against a mother’s death during parturition, which leaves one wondering what the other evolutionary compromises are that result in maternal death. The survival of a baby mostly trumps the needs of a mother for passing on genes (a gene where a child lives to breed has a very strong selection pressure), so that probably is one major reason.
If human societies have brought up maternal death orphans for many many generations, then maternal deaths should become more common?
This is generally not true for species that take a long time to reach reproductive maturity, and more so if they evolve to become physically underdeveloped at birth. A (proven) fertile human female is reproductively much more valuable than a newborn.
Other things to consider include that if the child’s genes kill the mother they generally do this by causing the child to fail to exit the mother, which also kills the child. The exception to this would mostly be genes that result in the mother’s death from blood loss, after the child had exited, so related to placental issues/placement. But for this to succeed for the child it also assumes someone else would care for the child as well as the mother would have, which is unlikely at best.
In a thread full of Not Even Wrong answers, I would say this is at least the right kind of answer. It stands to reason, I think, that barbed stinger + tear-off of stinger really does serve the purpose of inflicting maximal pain plus pheromone signalling. It's a bit unsatisfying as an answer however, as it would stand to reason that the same can be achieved without necessarily needing to trigger the death of the bee itself.
Regarding it being an accident of evolution, I would say I find it implausible that this one is accidental - a barbed stinger is specific and seemingly tailored (in a manner of speaking, not literally) toward a tear-off. With the example of humans having large brains which make childbirth difficult, by contrast, it's easy to see it as an unintended downstream consequence.
> To see this, we can look at our own immune systems. For instance, immune cells inside your body known as neutrophils are just as suicidal as the worker bees. When bacteria invade your body, neutrophils migrate to the site of infection, unleash a whole cocktail of toxins onto the bacteria, and then proceed to die within 1-2 days. In both cases, the suicidal nature of neutrophils and that of worker bees benefit the bigger entity that surrounds them. For worker bees, their death may save the colony from Winnie the Pooh, and the death of Neutrophils may save you from dying from a bacterial infection.
Genes aren't even unique within a single organism but genes are what is passed on, so how can you say that it is the entire population that reproduces?
There is no selfish calculus possible for individuals within a colony, they are all parts of the whole. Even the queen can get killed by the other bees if there is a younger more fit queen.
Male bees leave the hive every day to fly to a congregation area to mate with potential queens. They are quite literally analogous to sperm cells.
Corporations can be seen as superorganisms of humans. I don't think I have to elaborate too much here for this to seem a minimally acceptable metaphor?
There's even a queen replacement equivalent. In some circumstances a new new corporate queen will be prepared by the hive, but its also not uncommon for the (out of scope for this metaphor) mechanism of society to simply transplant one from elsewhere.
"Sterile cast of workers" probably requires the least explanation of the metaphorical equivalents here.
Governments as super organisms also seems an apt metaphor.
I mean, I disagree. Can you explain? Human workers aren't sterile, even if fertility rates aren't all that high.
Edit: Also unless employees are having sex and making the babies sort mail or fight off corporate raiders then the metaphorical aspects still hold.
In reality, it is not only much more useful but much more correct to think of the entire hive - or perhaps only the queen - as the individual bee.
That flying thing that stings you might not be a "bee" at all and the fact that it "dies" might be about as interesting to the hive/queen as clipping a fingernail is to you.
Do bees ever heal? Is perhaps the cost of evolving a genetic apparatus for large-scale repairs higher than just birthing another individual in the comb?
Reminds me of this article about the deceptive simplicity of evolution: http://pchiusano.github.io/2018-04-21/evolutionary-methods.h...
Not saying all of that is true. It seems to be pretty much philosohpy at this point. But maybe one day our methods scale up enough or evolve :-) in some other way and there will be a breaktrough in evolutionary AI, like there was in neural nets.
I was super fascinated with super-organisms back in college.
I convinced myself that mankind counts as a super-organism (although I’m sure experts might disagree, with reason). We’re an incredibly specialized bunch, the majority of us are utterly incapable of surviving without the tethers of civilization.
And I was super enamored with the notion that the internet was a central nervous system for this budding Homo sapiens super organism, and wanted to ask interesting questions like “is the super-organism intelligent?” To which the answer was “if we can learn from our mistakes.”
So I’m not so sure we’re an intelligent super-organism.
Isn't that what we always do when we use language?
To me a "super-organism" means seeing the whole instead of the parts. When I speak about myself, I don't say: my hands did, my feet walked. I say: I did, I walked. In my mind, I don't picture the multitude of cells composing my body as individual organisms, rather as parts of a single unit.
A popular trope these days but is there a basis for it? IME, almost every human I know cares deeply about what happens to other humans, to their country, community, family, etc. Many animals certainly bond with their families, some bond with humans and will die protecting them. I strongly doubt that creature are so narcissistic.
I know what happens to each individual human: They will die. I don't like that very much, but making human species survive doesn't seem to help. I don't really care if new, stranger humans will be born to learn about my time in history classes, and eventually die, too.
Natural selection isn't goal-oriented and can't look to the future to measure a potential benefit. It's essentially throwing everything at the wall and see what sticks deployed at scale. The bees have found a local optimum that happens to tolerate bees dying when they sting and there's no pressure for that to change. If the economic formula ever changed where dying put them at a disadvantage, then the evolution engine would kick into high gear.
Saying stuff like
> Let's not overlook that evolution is an economic process.
> If the economic formula ever changed where dying put them at a disadvantage, then the evolution engine would kick into high gear.
makes it sound like economists could explain and predict evolution, while in reality they struggle to even predict the next financial crisis, or deal with inflation and unemployment.
In fact, I would say this cult-like insistence on making up an evolutionary explanation for everything, which cannot be tested or falsified, and employing mental gymnastics to find any reason to fit the theory (instead of testing hypotheses by experimentation) sounds more like a conspiracy theory than science.
I think your question is still interesting, so let me ask you: When does a phenomenon require an explanation in your opinion?
This phrasing implies the premise is true, which I don't agree with, so I am going to tackle 3 related questions:
- Why does /any phenomenon/ require explanation?
Because we are curious, and want to know how and why things do what they do. Answers lead to more questions, to more answers, in a loop of learning
- Why do all biological phenomena need an evolutionary explanation?
Because outside of artificial selection, natural selection is the only causal mechanism (outside of pure chance). Mitosis, Miosis, and Mutation are the building blocks.
But much of that boils down to, "why is x the way it is? Because chance". which is not very interesting, which leads to...
- Why does bee sting suicide in particular warrant an explanation?
Because under a naive understanding of evolution, it is a paradox. Also, there was a time when proto-hymenoptera were not eusocial, so how did they become eusocial? Those are really interesting problems to look at.
You are right in pointing out that pop-sci evolutionary handwavy explanations are a problem. But I don't think that is common in the broad science in biology.
It is this particular cult-like insistence on the omnipotence of natural selection that I challenge. Maybe there are other causal mechanisms? In any case, it needs to be a falsifiable hypothesis before we can call it "science". Can you prove natural selection caused this particular feature of suicidal honeybees? Even if we assume the author's natural selection explanation makes sense, the causal mechanism is FAR from clear.
My complaint is, biologists are wrong by limiting themselves ONLY to the evolutionary toolbox instead of seeking other causal mechanisms. And it looks like a conspiracy theory when the come up with fanciful unfalsifiable unprovable "evolutionary" explanations of everything.
> Because under a naive understanding of evolution, it is a paradox.
Then maybe the response should be, something is wrong with the theory of evolution, i.e. the theory of evolution cannot explain every feature of every living being, and we need not pretend it can.
this also, those bees in the defense cohort are in the sunset of life, they will die of old age in 1 or 2 weeks.
non-regal bees have a life span of ~5weeks in warm season, this allows a turnover of labour specialties tuned to the situation at hand.
in winter bees change and live about 7months. i regularily overwinter my hives up here.
Normally worker bees live 4-6 weeks, but the winter generation somehow is coded to live the entire 3 months.
It kinda depends on where, too.
My only bee sting was on my chin (during recess in grade school) and it was definitely more painful than the wasp stings I've received on other parts of the body.
It took me a few moments to understand what was happening - and I ran into the house, bringing seveal more with me. One got into my shirt and stung me under my arm, and that felt like purple. I balistically punched myself in instinct until they were all dead.
Then I learned how it works. You get tagged by the first hornet. They have a little scent that is a 'tracer', and once they see it, you're marked. Many, many times now I have been tagged by an angry yellow jacket and run to safety before the first stinging. There's about a second or two where your muscle memory can sprint you out of their area, about 300 feet. Often they will be found slamming the back door for several minutes, trying to follow me.
They hate percussive vibrations. Walking, sledgehammering, digging. They have two entrances to their nests, always a hole in the ground. I own a bee suit and will just go dig it up with a shovel now. I think it's still legal to do in my state. I really hate yellow jackets, I'm sorry but I can't see what they are bringing other than their rage.
Is this a commonly known idiom? I've never heard it, and I Googled to no avail.
"Bees do not die after stinging. However, the stinger is left behind in the victim's skin and the bee will eventually die because it is attached to the bee's digestive tract and other internal organs. When a bee stings, it releases a chemical called pheromone that attracts other bees to attack. This is why it is important to remove the stinger as quickly as possible to prevent more stings.
Bees are essential pollinators and play a vital role in maintaining the balance of ecosystems. They are important for the health of plants and the production of food. Therefore, it is important to respect bees and avoid disturbing them, as they are a valuable and vital part of the natural world."
Because I come after them later with a can of RAID.
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