I think another way to look at it is to consider the hive
as the true organism, and the workers as only a part of it.
In this case, a worker stinging an intruder is rather like
a rattlesnake biting something and injecting venom. We
don’t necessarily say that the venom committed suicide!
In the same way, the worker is something less than an
individual.
One could argue that all species could be viewed this way, but I disagree. A male rattlesnake can survive on its own without a female, though it can’t continue its line. My observation is that most animal species can survive without other members of the same species, although they might find it difficult to do so.
But with bees (and other hive insects) the case is different. A queen can’t survive without workers because she can’t feed herself (I think this is true). A drone can’t survive without workers for the same reason. Workers can survive without drones or queens but they can’t procreate no matter how many you have.
So females, males, and workers are interrelated in a way that is fundamentally different from other animals.
Self-preservation is not the primary instinct of fauna, altho we may think otherwise. Preservation of the species is a higher instinct. So the Staff Report comports with that theory.
But I’ve always thought that bumblebees also die after stinging. Perhaps I’ve been wrong all these years. Perhaps not.
One thing to keep in mind is that a bee that has stung you does not die immediately. She will fly away and go off somewhere and die. You can be sure, tho, without her stinger, she is no longer a threat to anyone.
No, bumblebees (genus Bombus) do not have barbed stingers, and hence they do not get “stuck” and rupture themselves trying to pull it out (which is basically what kills the bee). Bumblebes can sting repeatedly. As Doug said, the only bees with barbed stingers are honeybees (genus Apis), and these are the only ones that die after stinging
Thanks, Colibri. I won’t mess round with bumblebees any more. Not that I ever did. I know about the barbs, and I also know that the queen bees don’t have them. They don’t have barbitu8s either.
A nice report by Doug. A question in my mind was: what are the mechanics of the honeybee stinger, and why does it pull out entirely from their bodies after the sting, versus the multiple stinging capacity of wasps, hornets, and bumblebees. Is it related to their design as pollinators?
I know that the honeybee stinger functions as an intact pump, forcing more venom into the threatening body. I tried to find an illustration on the web, but no luck so far.
I did find this site, which had the following interesting tidbit:
“For the first three weeks of their adult lives, the workers confine their labors to building the honeycomb, cleaning and polishing the cells, feeding the young and the queen, controlling the temperature, evaporating the water from the nectar until it thickens as honey, and many other miscellaneous tasks. At the end of this period, they function as field bees and defenders of the colony. The workers that develop early in the season live extremely busy lives, which, from egg to death, last about six weeks. Worker bees reared late in the fall usually live until spring, since they have little to do in the winter except eat and keep warm. Unlike other species of bees, honey bees do not hibernate; the colony survives the winter as a group of active adult bees.”
So, the honeybees that sting to protect the hive are actually at the end of their productive lives. What an efficient system!
Has javascript to enlarge 1000X and see the barbs. The barbs stick in the skin, and the weak point is the joint of abdomen to thorax, so the bee rips it’s back end off. Yeow. The venom sacks and pump keep working that way.
I think it would be more accurate to say that reproduction is frequently a higher imperative than personal survival. It more or less comes to the same thing as “preservation of the species”, but there is a difference. Most animals won’t die merely to preserve other members of their species who are not their close genetic relatives, but many animals will die to save, protect, or nourish their offspring, or in the course of reproducing themselves in the first place.
Staff Doug notably states, “choice is the essence of bravery.” Then, since he apparently hold bees can’t choose, so they can’t be “brave,” he says we should think of them as “little robots with first-class programming.” This latter statement I think goes against the essence of Darwin’s theories.
Those theories hold that humans evolved from other forms of animal life, that those evolved from still other forms, etc. etc. So if bees are “little robots” that can respond to their environment only in hard-wired, instinctual ways, from where did humans acquire the capacity for choice and, therefore, bravery?
I agree with Darwin that the abilities of nonhuman animals differ from our own in degree rather than in kind. That may be a very low degree for bees of the genus Apis, it may have nothing to do with stinging behavior of sterile workers, but unless we agree to accept the behaviorist/materialist view of even humans as “little robots with first-class programming” it’s got to be in there somewhere.
Good column, and good thread. Honey bees are fascinating.
Tom A: “the abilities of nonhuman animals differ from our own in degree rather than in kind.”
True. I would maybe think of it this way. I assume there are situations that bees instinctively avoid. I would guess that bees would avoid certain kinds of preditors. At some level, they “know” the danger to their individual selves.
But if that preditor were to attack the nest, the bees would attack. In the bees’ case, this is mostly programming, but can still be thought of as very simplified form of bravery. (Like you, I don’t know that the “sting=death” enters into it.)
One problem is that even with humans, we use the term ‘bravery’ somewhat loosely. If I were to threaten a human parent with children, the parent would be far more likely to fight than if alone. Some of that is instinct, although we would probably feel compelled to praise the parent’s bravery.
People trading their saftey for an ideal might considered a more pure form of bravery, although psycologists might talk of those people substituting the ideal for children, allowing them to make use of instinct. (Hmm … intentional use of one’s own instict as a tool? Cool.)
Doug argues that bees are “little robots with first-rate programming, designed to do whatever it takes to get the job done.” Therefore, they do not have “real-choice” (free-will) and cannot be considered brave for their actions.
So – Lets extend that. If they don’t have free-will, and cannot be considered brave for their actions, they can’t be cowards either, and they can’t be moral or immoral, or do right or wrong. They’re just robots. They’re as much responsible for their actions as a candle is responsible for burning, or a book for falling off a table.
But it would seem that Doug’s argument that bees are robots (Turing Machines) could be applied just as easily to humans.
So – the next time you do something wrong, just remember that Doug says its not your fault. Its the natural instinctive result of millions of years of evolution.
Irishman already made the point, let me amplify. Bees don’t die from stinging everything, just certain things. Bees can sting all sorts of things without dying. They are programmed to sting when threatened but stinging doesn’t always equal death for the bees.
When attacked bees release a pheremone which excites other bees to aggressive behavior. So once the chemicals kick in, it may be that bees fight like an angry mob, but the first bee or two definitely has to perceive a threat and react. Whether or not you want to call that robot-like behavior seems to have taken in this thread an emotional component. Calling bees robots is annoying to some readers which has in turn excited other readers. Makes me think we are not all that different from bees ourselves.
-Mr. Stefano.
Mr Hand: << But it would seem that Doug’s argument that bees are robots (Turing Machines) could be applied just as easily to humans. >>
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, Mr H, a thought-provoking first post. I don’t think I quite buy your logic, however. Human beings can reason from cause to effect: if I defend my home by sitting on my front sidewalk with a loaded shotgun, taking pot-shots at school children who might walk on my grass, I could get in trouble with the law. Bees do not have such reasoning ability, so far as we know.
If you want to say that humans in a mob are behaving robot-like, as are the bees, that’s a different discussion, when the mob mentality takes over.
((NOTE: Arguably, the question of whether bees or humans have free-will or choice or are simply “robots” is really a topic for GREAT DEBATE forum, but I’m leaving it here since Doug’s Staff Report raised the issue.))
Natural selection no longer operates on Homo sapiens (i.e., the behaviors and genetic makeups we see are not the result of differential reproductive superiority of individuals bearing those behaviors/genes), therefore you cannot examine present human behavior and draw meaningful conclusions about how it evolved, how it persists, what its adaptive value is, etc. Modern human behavior is, for want of a better word, aberrant, due to this breakdown in the correlation between a behavior and its consequences for Darwinian Fitness. There are other species in which a significant portion of their behavior is largely removed from the context of natural selection (basically, that’s what “culture” is - behaviors passed on non-genetically), but none so extreme as humans. There are, as far as we can tell, no behaviors passed on non-genetically among honey bees, so I stand by the statement that they are programmed for what they do, even the way they learn and the kinds of things they learn. Much of what makes us human we learn only by example; for a honey bee, even though they do learn things, nothing is learned by example. THAT is the distinction I’m drawing, and it’s not a purely subjective distinction. Many animals besides humans develop “free will” as they grow - the way I’m defining it (as acquiring behavior that is not inherent in the genome) - but not honey bees. If you’re still following me, you’ll also note that even a human being does not automatically have “free will” by this definition; were it possible for a human to develop without any social contact (I doubt it), so all behaviors were driven from within, you would have a human with no actual choice about how they behave.
Now, as an aside: it does, in fact, remain to be seen whether we, as a species, will persist, or if we’ll kill ourselves off by the way we’re acting, as seems increasingly likely. If we kill ourselves off, then we would prove (in the worst way possible) that our behavior was NOT in keeping with natural selection. Plenty of species have gone extinct, but we’ve got no evidence that anything ever evolved behavior that caused it to exterminate itself (though, admittedly, it might be tough to recognize such evidence if all we’ve got is fossils). For those of you familiar with game theory, this relates to the concept of “spite” - a behavioral class which we’ve yet to actually see in nature outside of humans, just like we’ve got no unambiguous cases of genuine “altruism”. We very well might be the first such exception to both of these theoretical behaviors, and the first to knowingly wipe ourselves out. That’s why this should go in the “Great Debate” bin - it won’t be resolved one way or the other until and unless we DO obliterate ourselves.
Irishman: thanks for the nice links. They were what I was looking for. The drone penis was more than I was looking for.
Since honeybees, excepting drones, are all female, the area that might be ordinarily designated for reproduction is instead developed as a specialized defense system. Anyone know the mechanics of this?
Since honeybees are all descended from the same Mother, how does this figure into their society?
Doug Yanega: I hear ya. In most quarters of Western human society,lately, sacrificing oneself for the greater good doesn’t get you very far(say, in the job of nurse), in a material sense. It’s a necessary job; the underpinning of the health professions, but there’s a dwindling supply of nurses because of diminishing returns. Ya’d think caring for the sick would be admired and awarded accordingly.
I don’t see any particular problem, from an evolutionary point of view, with stating that humans have capabilities which differ from those of bees in kind, and not just degree. There are lots of points in the history of life where organisms have evolved capabilities which other organisms do not possess to any degree. Plants have an ability to photosynthesize which humans do not have to any degree. There are completely sightless creatures. Some organisms can fly very well, some organisms can only fly a little bit, some organisms are descended from ancestors who could fly but have now lost that ability entirely, some organisms can glide considerable distances, and some organisms cannot get off the ground at all. I do agree it would be a mistake to be too free in ascribing to humans abilities which other large-brained mammals, and especially our closest primate kin, do not possess at all–there, we probably are talking more about differences in degree rather than differences in kind, although in some cases the differences are undeniably of a very large degree. But bees and humans diverged a looong time ago.
My guess is that bees have no more capacity for “bravery” or “love” than a heat-seeking missile.
I may be mistaken but I think the current theory is that modern green plants absorbed photosynthesizing components into their cells at some time in the past. Had humans done the same then we would be able to get energy from the sun. In other words, the capacity was already there, certain organisms got it while others didn’t.
Yes, descended from other creatures that could see. But I’m not claiming, say, that early human ancestors had little wings like bees that fell off later.
So did dogs and humans. Does that mean dogs are little robots? Many people don’t think so. I think they have good reasons for that.
The question then becomes, how did “free will” evolve and, if some evolutionary lines don’t have it, which ones do? My contention is essentially that if “free will,” or more precisely consciousness, however defined, confers an evolutionary advantage somehow then it must do so at a very early point, earlier even than bees, perhaps even at the level of single cells.
You’re getting into philosophical and perhaps religious concepts with “free will.” A single cell could not have either free will or consciousness since that presupposes a mind. “Mind” may not reside in the brain but it requires some brain-containing organism.
Many religions hold that consciousness resides in the soul and they deny a soul to animals other than humans. I don’t happen to agree with that. If a man has a soul, so does a dog. However, that was the whole basis for Thomas Aquinas’ proof of man’s immortality.
We say animals’ actions are neither good or bad (wrong, malicious, evil, etc.), as they do what they have to do to survive. Hence, sharks attack man and eat him. Do they have free will or conciousness? I don’t think they have free will. They do what they must.
Nothing special at all. Workers CAN lay eggs, and often do (in one race from South Africa, the workers are parthenogenetic, even). The structures are virtually the same. The worker’s sting has barbs, the queen’s does not. The venom sac is more well-developed in the worker. The autotomy (breakaway sting feature) is the most significant difference.
But they have about 20 different fathers, so the mother’s genes are about the only thing the average workers have in common; the odds are only 1 in 20 that they share any OTHER genes by descent, so average relatedness is only about 30% instead of the 50% typical for nearly any other sexual organism. The different worker patriline factions within the hive (which share 75% of their genes) compete for the genetic “honor” of creating the next queen, in fact, so they’re not purely cooperative (and predictably so, given the asymmetrical relationships).
So, animals that have a nervous system but no brain are not conscious? If consciousness is no more than a side effect of having a (complicated enough) brain, in other words it contributes no evolutionary advantage in and of itself, then why should humans be conscious? Wouldn’t it be better for our survival if we couldn’t feel physical pain or emotional distress?
Conversely, if dogs don’t have souls then neither do humans. Now, for “souls,” read “consciousness.”
Reverse the positions of animals and humans in this statement and I don’t think a being from Mars, using only observed behavior, could tell which was doing “what they must” and which had “free will or consciousness.” The statement also assumes without warrant that every shark always acts only in ways that increase the likelihood of its individual survival and/or the perpetuation of its species, while some humans may not.
My contention, to state it a different way, is that if a shark feels excited or happy or amused (or whatever the shark-like equivalents of these human emotions may be) over the prospect of eating something then it is more likely to be successful. Further, that sharks (and dogs and bees) probably have some ability to formulate, evaluate and act on alternative courses of action in at least some situations; which will do for a definition of “free will” until a better comes along.
