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

Honeybee queens are the only honeybees with stingers that don&#x27;t die when they sting. That&#x27;s because the queen bee&#x27;s stinger has no barbs, and the reason for that is that the queen must not die easily, and she <i>must</i> use her stinger, so if she&#x27;s going to survive at all her stinger has to not have barbs. The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens that are about to hatch or have hatched already. She also has to possibly use her stinger when she goes out to mate (though she does go with attendants who will defend her if attacked).<p>I was surprised not to find mention of this in TFA.<p>&gt; A honey bee dies when it stings you because its stinger is covered in barbs, causing its abdomen to get ripped out when it tries to fly away. And surviving with your guts spilling out everywhere is pretty bloody hard.<p>There&#x27;s another interesting detail here: when the worker tries to fly off after stinging, she has to try <i>really</i> hard because the barbs hold the stinger in place, and trying hard causes two things to happen:<p><pre><code> - noise that attracts other workers to attack the same creature - spreading of the dying bee&#x27;s distress pheromones that also attract other workers to sting the same creature </code></pre> So when you get stung by a bee near other bees you will be in trouble. That&#x27;s how you go from one sting to hundreds. And hundreds is enough to kill a human. That&#x27;s why you don&#x27;t go near a hive without protection. Being in or near a swarm is safer than being near a hive: the bees in a swarm don&#x27;t have much (larvae, honey) to protect, so they don&#x27;t attack.

While a bee stinger may get stuck in you, that&#x27;s not so when stinging fellow insects.<p>The barbs don&#x27;t catch on an exoskeleton like they do for thick and elastic mammalian skin.<p>An elegant way to deliver more venom to larger targets.

A fascinating read about such things is &quot;The Red Queen&quot; by Ridley.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0060556579" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0...</a><p>It&#x27;s all about the propagation of the genes, not the survival of the organism.

I don&#x27;t understand why any &quot;why&quot; question in evolutionary biology is ever satisfied with a &quot;survival of the fittest&quot; truism. Any evolutionary explanation you give me is also falsified by the existence of another species with a different&#x2F;opposite trait. Whatever explanation you give for a bee&#x27;s barbed stinger is falsified by the wasp&#x27;s non-barbed one. Also doesn&#x27;t answer other questions, such as why didn&#x27;t bees evolve a type of barbed stinger that doesn&#x27;t rip their guts out and kill them? Or why do they even need a stinger at all, as many insects don&#x27;t have one?<p>Evolutionary explanations like these for &quot;why&quot; things are the way they are not just pure idle speculation, but they are also often unprovable, unfalsifiable, and have the same circular logic as bad religion. Why do species survive? Because they were the fittest, because they survived. But why?

Because Melissa pissed off Zeus.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawliomics.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;12&#x2F;zeus-the-honeybee-and-the-sting&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawliomics.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;12&#x2F;zeus-the-honeyb...</a>

As I&#x27;ve been listening to Mythos recently, I must point out that it is also because Zeus cursed the Bee<p>&gt; In his final response on the matter he declared that she will be a Queen of a colony of workers that will aid her in gathering honey. However, Greek Gods were never truly honourable in their wishes unless it benefitted them directly. In addition to her swarm of workers she was also granted a fatal sting, but this sting would be fatal to her or her colony if they ever used it on another. It was from then on that the honeybees’ was barbed; meaning that if their weapon was ever to be “deployed” that the individual that used their sting would not survive the attack.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawliomics.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;12&#x2F;zeus-the-honeybee-and-the-sting&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawliomics.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;12&#x2F;zeus-the-honeyb...</a>

&gt; the result is the picture at the top of this article<p>But there is no picture at the top of the article, at least on mobile.

Hobby beekeeper here.<p>Worker bees dies when they sting a person, because the stinger and venom pump remain when they fly off, ripping their abdomen open.<p>The purpose of this is that the venom pump continues to function after they have left, making the sting as painful as possible.<p>Honeybees are a superorganism, where the survival of the colony supersedes the survival of any individual bee.

A random bee sting <i>in class</i> was the straw that broke my back in a mid 90s multivariable calculus lecture at a Swedish university where I was studying CS&#x2F;EE. It lead to me dropping out. Went to a local internet&#x2F;web software startup instead and a whole new world opened up.<p>Yes, I had been behind. I&#x27;m doing OK now :)

This concept blew my mind when I internalized it.<p>Same reason why honest signals exist. A peacock with very rich feathers is a fitness disadvantage. But they find mates more successfully. These traits persist in the gene pool.<p>It’s so much easier to just evolve a cheating trait that does the job of finding a mate even without the required fitness.<p>But the signals stay honest for the most part.<p>Why?<p>It’s because ultimately the species survives, not the individuals.<p>In a lot of cases, something that makes the individual more fit also makes the species more fit. But in some cases, they are inversely proportional.<p>Hence you end up with suicidal genes that favor the death of the individuals for the greater good of the species.<p>Now extrapolating to human society, most nations have landed on a system where taxes are paid to the government. Every individual might complain and try to get out of paying. But we do. Why? Maybe because societies where that wasn’t a thing were less fit and didn’t last long enough to still be around.

The group selection part is really interesting evolution-wise. It seems a very slow and difficult method of selection. I had never considered how something dying, and not passing along their genetics, could enforce a genetic trait.

I can offer another &quot;why?&quot; How many animals attack a wasp&#x27;s nest? Almost zero, except other wasps in a territory war? How many animals attack a beehive? Humans, bears, apes,.. pretty any big enough mammal that can climb. So bees not only suffer from much more predators due to their precious honey, in my view they also need to differentiate between &quot;honey maker&quot; and warrior (sting) functions as their poison could contaminate the honey. Why do the males have to die? Because almost none of their enemies can extract a bee sting from their skin. Once stung, the poison glands and some muscles remain with the sting, acting as a &quot;poison pump&quot;. This could deter the attacker longer from a second attack. Which makes sense, as the beehive cannot run away from the attacker.

The concept of indirect fitness must be more complicated than explained here. The article explains it as a worker bee sharing 75% of her genes with her sisters, but only 50% with a child, so there is selection pressure for workers to be sterile and self-sacrificing. But few genes actually differ between individuals, so the percentages are much higher. E.g., I share ~ 99% of my genes with each one of you reading this. Assuming honey bees&#x27; genetic variation is not much more extreme than human variation, we&#x27;re talking about 99.5% vs. 99.75% sharing, which sounds more like an explanation of why altruism would be preferred in general rather than uniquely affecting bees.<p>The article does eventually circle around to acknowledge this, but it&#x27;s easy to miss and very underdeveloped compared to the discussion of kin selection: &quot;So why do bees die when they sting you? Perhaps because they&#x27;re disposable parts of a larger super-organism which has evolved by multi-level selection.&quot;

Why do humans live long enough to be grandparents? It&#x27;s because grandparents take care of the grandkids while the parents work.

This entire article is flawed in my opinion. Bees are not &quot;suicidal&quot;. They are not meant to die after they sting. It&#x27;s just that they have not adapted to stinging mammals with elastic skin (and probably will not). Bees can absolutely live after stinging if they manage to dislodge the stinger from the skin.

&gt;Thirdly, the haplodiploidy hypothesis only works if all sisters share the same father and if a queen is biased to produce more daughters than sons.<p>The sex ratio doesn&#x27;t actually seem like a problem for the theory, because it sounds like for a worker bee, the relatedness of the marginal sibling is 5&#x2F;8 in expectation, vs. 1&#x2F;2 relatedness of the marginal offspring.<p>I think you also have to discount the relatedness into the future. If the colony you are born into is already established, your 5&#x2F;8 related marginal sibling has a much higher likelihood of survival than your 1&#x2F;2 related marginal offspring when you take into account the risk of breaking from the colony and starting your own.<p>That probably goes some way to explaining the first problem of multiple fathers. Marginal half-siblings are only 1&#x2F;4 related to the worker, but they may have a greater chance of survival.

&gt; we humans and nearly all other mammals certainly don&#x27;t have a singular queen and a sterile caste of workers.<p>No we have many queens and many sterile workers. Almost all women have children and increasingly more men don&#x27;t father children. We&#x27;ve outlawed polygamy, but society is trending that way anyway, especially considering online dating statistics. 80% of women are choosing from the top 20% of men.<p>Men die in war. Look at ukraine. A million men dead, while women dance in clubs. Vietnam, on the American side: 55,000 men dead, 8 women dead. Most women stayed home, like the queen bee. Most of those men were sterile for all intents and purposes.<p>If we don&#x27;t introduce artificial measures, the natural tendency is toward fewer women mating with more men and the end result is one to many. There&#x27;s a British lady trying to mate 1,000 men.<p>We are more like bees than we like to think.

They can actually survive if you let them.<p>Here’s a video of a guy filming himself being stung by a bee, then watching as the bee spins around, works its stinger loose, and flies away:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;G-C77ujnLZo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;G-C77ujnLZo</a>

Bee&#x27;s are a product of many millions of years of evolution, so the why, is that it works! Ever watch bees?, bugs?, other things, up close and in the danger zone? I do. A bee&#x27;s stinger will embed in you, or me, and then the venom sack rips right out of the bee and it is possible to watch the venom sack pump venom without the bee itself attached anymore. I was attending my mother in her herb garden and commented on there bieng honey bees around, which she disputed, so I caught one, and held its legs while it tried to sting me, and showed her this, but my hands are so callused, that its stinger would not go in, then I let it go. She says I am an improbable creature, and describes me bieng a half Vulcan and half Klingon.

For the record, almost no bees die when they sting you. This is just a weird myth that people repeat nonstop.<p>This <i>only</i> happens to honeybees, and <i>only</i> when they&#x27;re stinging humans. Most skin is much thicker than ours, more similar to our feet callouses. The stinger isn&#x27;t supposed to go in. That&#x27;s closer to a sword&#x27;s foil.<p>The reason they panic when it happens is it&#x27;s not supposed to happen.<p>The stingers are mostly meant for combat with other insects. You can watch these fights on youtube. They never, ever end with the bee self eviscerating.<p>This is a simple example of people trying to look smart by explaining things which, when you check, just aren&#x27;t true.

&gt; The haplodiploidy hypothesis, though nice, is not without its problems. Firstly, there are plenty of species with haplodiploid genetics which do not form eusocial colonies.<p>That is not a problem. Reproductive fitness must always be measured relative to an environment. Just because colony life is a successful strategy for haplodiploid species in some environments does not mean it will be a successful strategy in all environments. You can see this in other species. Female lions live mostly in cooperative groups while male lions and all other large cats (leopards, cheetahs, and tigers) are solitary.

Am I the only one who grew up with bees dying after stinging carrying a sort of unspoken significance or meaning?<p>I don&#x27;t think I ever heard someone actually state it, but growing up I had the feeling that bees dying when they sting you was in some sense &quot;significant&quot; because it meant that bees had to be selective in when they chose to resort to violence.<p>It was almost like an unspoken fable or illustration about the importance of controlling aggression.

Isn’t that just so unbearably sad? These little creatures work tirelessly their whole lives, buzzing from flower to flower, pollinating the plants that sustain ecosystems and our food supply. They barely get to live a few weeks as worker bees, and then if they ever need to sting to protect their hive... that’s it. Their life ends in an act of ultimate devotion.

The title is a bit misleading as it really doesn’t explain why bees die when they sting in the sense of a causality. The article itself mentions that the stinging mechanism bees use, is itself not a prerequisite for how they are organized as wasp use a different one. Very interesting read though.

Kind of got me thinking is there any tool or is someone working on something that can parse a DNA and give you the end result for any species? If not what&#x27;s the main challenge<p>Would be a cool challenge for all the quantum supremacy folk

The interesting question to me is, “does the <i>bee</i> know it’s going to die if it stings you?”<p>And therefore, acts judiciously in deciding when, if ever, to sting? So that it only does it when it’s life-threateningly mad at something?

this is wild because the article starts off with explaining how &quot;why&quot; is a bad question, and then doubles down on this entire thesis explaining why a bee dies when it stings <i>you</i>, a human, and the evolutionary nature supporting it<p>except, its entirely wrong and the foreshadowing about &quot;why&quot; was super important: bees don&#x27;t &#x27;expect&#x27; to die when they sting you. they can sting many creatures and not get their abdomen ripped out because the barb doesn&#x27;t get stuck in the thing they stung. <i>just like wasps</i>.<p>so this 20 page dissertation is completely baseless.

Stepping back a little and try to projecting that logic onto humans, are we more like super organisms? Interestingly, Our social constructs does have similarities of both superorganism and non- superorganism

To prove Mr Feynman right: because I stomp on it.

The next time my wife asks me why we have something new, my response will be &quot;Because in a capitalistic society, you can exchange money for ____.&quot;

TLDR;<p>Suicidal altruism and costly signaling for the survival of the super-organism. Also, zombie poison delivery pumps.

Can someone answer this without an evolutionary presupposition?