[Moderating]
Let’s keep personal comments out of GQ. I have said nothing that could be construed as “irrational bias against you.”
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Of course I have read the thread. However, the death of a worker incurs a cost on the hive, even if it is an altruistic death. If the worker were able to defend the hive without dying and thus incurring that cost, it would be preferable to it dying. Therefore it is reasonable to ask what if any additional benefit might outweigh that cost.
First of all, sorry for lashing out a bit there in my last post.
Second, thanks to everybody who tried to give an answer, and thanks especially to RaftPeople and Alan Smithee for understanding where I come from and answering the question as it was intended.
Third, lissener, I’m not interested in stirring up any shit with you, however, you continue to misinterpret the original question. You said yourself:
And that is entirely correct; it was, in fact, pretty much this train of thought that prompted me to pose the question: my impression that the bees dying is detrimental to the survival fitness of the population is apparently incorrect, as is evidenced by bees generally doing pretty well overall. So, I thought I’d get educated on the subject – and ask whether this apparent detriment is outweighed by some advantage, or if there is some other reason this does not negatively impact overall survival fitness.
People then were quick to point out that evolution does not seek out perfect solutions, that good enough is good enough, a chorus which you then joined, and of course that’s perfectly right, but also perfectly besides the point, as my question was concerned with how this is good enough to ensure appropriate survival rates. That this is obviously good enough was my starting point – else, there wouldn’t have been any reason for confusion, and I wouldn’t have had any cause to ask this question, since if it weren’t good enough to ensure the survival of the species, my impression that the bees dying after stinging isn’t a really great survival tactic would have been right to start with.
I haven’t refused to rethink this ‘assumption’ (though I would rather call it an impression) at all; questioning it was the very reason for opening this thread. Whenever I have repeated it, it was just in an attempt to convey this very point, to clarify that my question is this: ‘obviously, the way it seems to me is wrong, so what’s right, and why?’
Also, the ‘metaphor’ you decried is a relatively rigorous model used to mathematically study evolutionary processes; there really isn’t any good basis for you to attack it.
Bottom line being, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask for the adaptive value of any trait, under anybody’s understanding of evolution, and that’s all I did.
I’ve read the whole thread, and, while the protection of the honeybee hive is mentioned, I didn’t see the specific mention of the fact that honeybees differ from other bees in that they produce a valuable, attractive product to mammalian predators: their store of honey. (Hope I didn’t miss that.)
It would be quite reasonable, then, for the selection of a trait that could defend that crucial food store from predators, especially when the young of the hive are enmeshed within the structure, and a large predator tearing it apart for honey is an extreme threat. So, perhaps extreme measures were called for; a large pumping venom sac on the stinger seems like a great solution to a physically huge predator, not great for the indivudual bee, but effective en masse for the hive.
The death of a single worker incurs such a small cost to a large hive (and to the point, to its reproductive success) as to be hard to even measure or consider. If the worker is near the end of its typical lifespan anyway (which Alan noted is the case) then it is even smaller than that. It may even be that an older worker costs the hive as much in resources as they contribute, for all we know, other than the defensive purpose they have the potential to serve by their death.
The assumption is a false one and the reasons that it is false involve understanding how and at what level the genes that are being selected for or against are selected. It is a good question to ask however.
I don’t understand how you can state this–“the death of a worker incurs a cost on the hive”–as a universally inarguable fact. It flies in the face of a million examples to the contrary.
How many surviving offspring does a pair of rabbits need to spawn over their lifetime in order to maintain the population? Two. How many do they actually produce? I’m not gonna look it up, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s more than two. The balance that is thus maintained is that the predators get fed (to the extent that you can lay artificial concepts of intent and purpose on evolution, you could say that, all things considered, the “purpose” of rabbits is to manufacture meat for predators), while the rabbit population continues survive, as a population, or “hive,” to make an analogy. Theoretically, if none of those “surplus” rabbits ever succumbed to predation, the balance would fail; thus survival incurs a cost to the “hive,” not a benefit.
Now obviously the analogy is not perfectly parallel with bees; with bees the issue is not necessarily one of overpopulation and balance within the ecosystem. But, along with the white-tailed-deer analogy offered by Triskademus, perhaps it serves to further demonstrate that “the death of a worker incurs a cost on the hive” is not a universally inarguably assumption.
The only inarguable assumption is that it incurs a cost on the individual; all else is up for discussion. (Ask a male Black Widow or Praying Mantis, whose corpses go to feed the mother of their children. I’d call that a *benefit *to the “hive,” not a cost.)
There is a cost – if mortality rates among worker bees were lower, their production rates could be lowered also, leading to free resourced to be invested into propagating the hive’s genetic material.
In the other examples you and Triskademus mention, there is similarly a cost, however, it is outweighed by certain benefits; what, if any, those benefits in the bee case were was precisely my question.
(However, the rabbit example is somewhat ass-backwards, since producing a lot of offspring is an adaptive response to the high levels of predation; rabbits did not evolve the ability to be easily killed by things bigger than they are to counteract overpopulation.)
At this point we’re in a downward spiral of sophistry to determine who’s “more right.” Spare me.
Asked and answered, *ad *literally nauseum.
Fair enough; I’d asked to take this pissing contest somewhere else, like, 25 posts back – your failure to do so is the only reason you got wet feet now.
My first post in this thread I described one possible benefit to the cited circumstances that would benefit survival of bees as a species.
The last example I gave described a benefit to the species that required developing specifically life limiting characteristics in males for the benefit of the continuation of those same characteristics. Individual survival after procreation, or among non procreational individuals in the species is always contra survival for the species, to some degree. No other species competes for resources more than your own.
Tris
No; your insistence on dictating the terms of the answer to your question, in the face of many knowledgeable people sincerely trying to answer you, is what kept it going, till everyone but me backed away slowly. I gave you more credit than that, and held out a naive hope that you might honestly be trying to understand, but now that it’s clear that you were really only interested in having the last word, I leave you to it.
Don’t worry, lissener. I’ll know better than to demand that your answers make sense. Someday the rest will learn, too.
I think the basic source of the (apparent) disagreement here is that we are talking about two different kinds of “costs” - gross cost and net cost. My statement was referring to gross cost; you are looking at net “cost” (or net value). Of course net value will determine whether or not a trait ends up being selected for; but the gross cost still has to be taken into account in calculating the net cost.
Certainly producing a honeybee worker has a cost to the hive. The queen has to produce an egg from food provided to her; and the other workers have to feed the larva until it becomes an adult worker. This is the gross cost. If the worker is killed before the end of its natural life span, when it is still productive, there will also be a utility cost due to the loss of its labor.
Of course these costs are balanced by benefits, including the labor of the worker in building the hive, caring for young, foraging for food, and defending the nest. The net “value” of the worker will be determined by the relative value of the costs of having produced it and its maintenance costs, vs the benefits it accrues to the hive. This kind of cost-benefit analysis is standard in evolutionary theory.
This being said, all other things being equal, if one species is able to defend its nest without the sacrifice of workers, while in another species workers necessarily die in order to defend the nest, then the former species should have lower gross costs and thus will realize a higher net value from the defense. The latter species will be at a competive disadvantage relative to the former. Therefore it is reasonable to ask what other factors might compensate for that disadvantage.
I agree that this is a likely reason accounting for the evolution of the honeybee defense system.
[Moderating]
Let’s stop the personal jabs here and get back to discussing the OP. This goes for everyone. This is not (yet) an official warning, but more bickering may result in one.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
And that post was exactly along the lines of what I hoped to be getting in the way of an answer.
I apologize for the tone of my last post to you, however, I can’t help myself but try to politely once more point out that all I attempted to do was clarify my question; Colibri, Alan Smithee and others have shown that it is perfectly well possible to understand and try to answer it on its intended terms.
Anyway, I consider this topic dealt with; thanks for all your answers.
Except that there’s been at least 4 different possible answers, and no one has been able to produce any reliable cites proving which is right. I don’t think your input into this thread has been very helpful, everyone else seems to have understood what the OP is looking for at this point.
That’s a good post. It sounds like it’s probably somewhere close to the truth. It’s a shame we can’t seem to find any proof for it beyond Wikipedia! 
For what it’s worth at this point in the discussion. The bee’s stinger is much more complicated than the simple idea of a needle that shoots venom. Basically, the whole ass end of the bee is a venom injection system. It consists of two barbed lancets that move independently and a shaft that attaches to the venom sac. The lancets cut their way in and the venom is pumped by the same muscle contraction, so that a bee can sting in just a second and the barbs allow the bee to continue to pumping venom after that second is over, even if they get swatted. Without the barbs, say like a snake fang, the bee would shoot less venom so it would need to be much stronger to do the job I would think.
Also, a typical bee hive might have 50,000 bees in it. 10 or 20 bees giving their lives in defense is a very small price. If they had to make do with smooth, needle like stingers that required them to stay on the victim for a longer time they may well take much higher losses.
Interesting side trip, on the discussion of bee evolution here.
Tris
This is really an important factor in the honeybee’s sting, and I should have called attention to that in my post. The tear-off venom pump is an extreme response to a predator, but the addition of a pheremone to focus the attack is really elegant, to my mind.
I work around honeybees a lot, both at work, and at home, where my landlord keeps hives, (past president of NC Beekeepers), so lots of bees around. They rarely sting except when a threat to the hive is involved.
Found a up-to-date article on bee aggression, worth a look.
Your main error is thinking that “natural selection” works at every turn of life. It only works at fatal turns of life prior to reproducing. If a trait tends to reduce fecundity, it will tend to disappear. Any behavior after reproducing is strictly random. Natural selection does not care if old people are prosperous or starve, nor if infertile bees die of one cause or another. Also, things that aren’t statistically significant won’t shift the gene pool. It only takes two of the hive reproducing to keep the lineage alive.