I’m sure this has come up before, but bee’s a three letter word and thus ignored by the search engine… So it’s probably quicker to just ask and wait for an answer rather than trying to get the terms right.
So, (honey) bees die after they plunge their stinger into an attacker’s body, by virtue of said stinger being barbed and remaining there, partially tearing the bee’s insides out when it flies away. This doesn’t strike me as a very brilliant tactic, survival-wise. I know that the individual bee isn’t all that important, and after all transfer of genetic material only occurs via the queen, so protecting her is probably the highest priority; but even so, having all your soldiers be kamikazes strikes me as problematic, since you’d tend to run out eventually.
The only thing I’ve found is that the detached venom sac possesses some degree of autonomy, and is able to keep delivering venom while the bee goes of to die her gruesome death somewhere else. But can this one gift-that-keeps-on-giving sting really outweigh the ability of stinging multiple times, and perhaps even keeping your soldiers (and workforce)? Or is there some other advantage I’m not seeing?
Well, yes, but my question way more along the lines of ‘How is this good enough?’ I know that not everything has to convey a survival advantage, but the way things are now just seem like a manifest disadvantage to me, which typically are selected against unless outweighed by a beneficial factor.
It’s good enough as in the queen survives often enough that they can expand into new hives year after year. Not good enough means she dies too often in the attack on the hive and the species dies out. That is all it comes down to. Don’t try to give an animal’s genetics the qualities of a thinking mind
I assure you, I don’t. I was just wondering if there are any additional effects favouring this defence tactic – like, for instance, naturally controlling overpopulation or something like that. If all it comes down to is ‘it works because it works’, then that’s that, but I thought it didn’t hurt to ask.
Besides, if that’s all there is to it, how did it develop in the first place? Queens of other state-building insects survive often enough without their defenders killing themselves in the line of duty all the time, so how is it that these suicide tactics, at the very least, never were selected against? As I said, I can’t see any advantage to this kamikazing, but disadvantages – more bees dead, less defensive forces, less well guarded hives, less surviving bee queens – seem readily apparent. Even if these disadvantages are without consequences, and bee queen survival rates aren’t impacted by them, such a complex mechanism evolving without need – without conveying any new advantages – seems a bit unlikely.
I saw a documentary where a bee stung someone, and they just let it. It then walked in a spiral, unwound its stinger from the guy’s arm, and flew off.
Possible hypothesis: the stinger is designed to kill smaller animals instantly, and the bee survives. It only commits suicide when it stings a larger animal.
Second though, it helps think of an individual bee (or ant, or wasp, termite, etc.) as merely a remote-control “cell” of the organism that is the hive.
Keep in mind the warning devices of honey bees - bright, distinctive colors; sound; the way they fly towards a threat in a threatening manner of their own. I don’t know too many people who flagrantly ignore those warning signs to further antagonize bees. While there are animals that will bull through those defenses, such as bears, a lot of animals that would otherwise attack hives for the honey, pollen, and baby bees tend not to do so in order to avoid getting stung. So honey bees can often ward off threats without stinging.
If attacked by something like a bear, however, even if the bee survived stinging it is highly unlikely to survive being swatted by a paw. Therefore, in that case, post-sting survival is sort of moot.
So a lot of the time, when it gets to the point the bee is going to sting survival afterwards is chancy at best. Therefore, post-sting survival is not strongly selected for, or perhaps at all. Honey bees also have massive numbers in their hives compared to, say, bumblebees who do survive post-sting and where the numbers are small enough that an occasional survival post-sting might be critical enough that it is selected for. Wasps, also, survive post sting and also tend to much smaller colonies or even a solitary lifestyle.
So there are, no doubt, several factors at work here that lead to honeybees frequently or always dying after stinging and other insects not so much.
One may well ask what is the use of a soldier dying in combat. The bee dies, but the stinger remains embedded to deliver even more venom and provide an even more painful sting to the victim, providing much stronger disincentive for said victim’s future meddling in the affairs of bees.
According to Wikipedia, the barbed stinger of a honey bee generally does not detach when the bee stings an invertebrate (i.e. another insect). Such detachment wouldn’t be useful, since a sting like that is typically fatal to the victim-insect. But if you’re going to sting a vertebrate with 100,000 times your mass, you’ll need to deliver a whole lot of venom to make the punishment as strongly felt as possible. And it’s OK to die in the effort, since your genes will be passed on via other means.
A (more) ideal solution of course would be for the stinger to detach in a non-fatal way, so the bee flies away, grows a new ass, and continues to function in the service of the hive. But as others have noted, evolution isn’t “perfect” (whatever that is), just “good enough,” as evidenced by the continuing existence of honeybees as a species.
Since the individual bee is sterile (the sting was derived from its sex organs) and thus unable to produce a new bee its a very small loss compared to what could happen if some large creature attacked the entire hive. It’s only real chance of passing on its genes is to protect the queen.
I wouldn’t call the bee “remote controlled” though, its more the case that its acting on instinct that’s designed to mesh with the instinct of other bees, thus generating a system (i.e. the hive) which could, by some philosophical argument, constitute a mind of it’s own.
Bees don’t automatically lose their stinger whenever they sting something; it’s only when they sting mammals that it happens. The reason they developed the sting was primarily to fight with other bees from different hives, and against other bees the sting can penetrate and kill without being ripped out. But against mammals the sting accidentally gets lodged in the skin and gets torn out, leading to the bee dying.
So, the use of the bee sting is to kill other bees, which they can do hundreds of times without dying. The fact bees will accidentally die if they sting a mammal has no use; so what it actually indicates is that bees don’t sting mammals often enough for it to become an important evolutionary disadvantage.
Two items I haven’t yet seen in this thread (ex-beekeeper here): Not all stinger-type creatures have barbed stingers that detach from the body, not even all bees; wasps, for example, can sting multiple times without injury to themselves. And when the bee stinger detaches, it carries with it the sac and pumping mechanism, which continues to inject venom into the victim for a while, exacerbating the sting.
I’m sure there is an evolutionary reason for both of these.
So a word of advice. If you’re stung by a bee, don’t pinch the stinger with your fingers to remove it, as you are just pushing more venom thru it; scrape it off with a fingernail instead. And do it as quickly as you can.
All of the above, plus worker bees wear out after a month or so anyway (during the summer, a few months if they are able to make full use of the hives HMO plan–they’re Union). They are totally expendable, so it really doesn’t matter if they die on the petal or stinging something.
is the contradiction: one says the barbs evolved because they help killing other insects (in which case the autonomous venom sac makes no sense), and become a hazard when used against vertebrates, the other claims that they are precisely there to be embedded in vertebrate tissue. Perhaps, though, a combination is possible: you get the bonus of having an easier time killing other insects, which turns into a hazard when fighting vertebrates, which, however, is somewhat mitigated by having the auto-injecting venom sac, so at least you get the most for your sting.
Thanks for the other answers, as well; I don’t have the time to reply to all individually right now.
It might be more difficult for a bee to get into and stay in stinging position than we think. They may only get one or two shots at it before they get knocked off. Therefore, if they leave their stinger implanted on the first strike, they get to deliver ALL of their venom. Think about it like a soldier trying to storm a building and shoot the defenders. He may only get off a couple of shots before he is killed or driven back. Better that he throw a grenade through the door for a big boom.
If a bee comes up, implants its stinger, and leaves, you can fit more bees onto an animal during the course of an attack than if the bees just hang around on the skin surface, blocking access to other bees. Let’s say you can only fit four bees onto a square inch of flesh. If they’re there the whole time they are delivering their venom, no other bees can attack that square inch of flesh. But, if they stick in their stingers and go, the stingers keep delivering the venom while the next group of four bees comes up and puts their OWN stingers in. Much more venom per square inch per second.
Since colony insects do a lot of signaling to their hivemates, perhaps stinging, leaving the stinger in place, and then running home to warn the rest of your colony (before you drop dead) that the hive is under attack is more useful than staying at the battle scene to sting again and again, while your hive goes unwarned and danger moves closer.
i think that state building creatures expect a high mortality in just daily life of food gathering. their systems are designed to take massive losses for many reasons.
other organisms also depend on high fecundity to survive. plants which are for the most part defenseless, in genera,l depend on reproducing at well above the likely survival rate. microorganisms also reproduce at massive rates because it is so easy for an individual not to survive.
evolution favors useful features being passed on. no consequences to species survival doesn’t steer selection. there must be no overall disadvantage to species survival for this to exist. because the stinger is left in large animals with a pump is a species survival advantage or at least not a disadvantage.
From a genetic/evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense to think of individual workers as cells in a body rather than as individual organisms. It’s the hive that needs to survive; workers are dispensable. Due to a quirk of bee reproduction, a worker shares more genetic material with its fellow workers and its queen than it would share with its own offspring if it were capable of reproduction.
Also, I believe it was an episode of QI that stated that most bee species are able to sting repeatedly, and most wasp species have barbs that cause them to die after one sting. It’s just that the species we’re most familiar with are exceptions to these rules. I don’t know where they got that information.