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

BTW, when I get stung, if the stinger doesn't get stuck I sometimes don't even notice till much later -- this happens when I get stung through my gloves. If the stinger does get stuck in my skin the first thing I notice is the buzzing of the bee that stung me. The frequency of the buzzing of the bee that stung me and that is trying to rip off the stinger is absolutely terrifying because I know what comes next: a dozen more bees will flock right to where the one bee stung me and will all try to sting me, and since the one bee was able to it might be the case that her sisters will succeed as well. That buzzing spreads her injury pheromones, and the frequency of its sound also acts as a very loud and clear signal to her sisters. The buzzing lasts about 1 second or less; the pain from the sting comes a second or two later. It takes her sisters about 1 to 2 seconds to find the bee that stings successfully. Getting stung by a dozen bees at once is panic inducing, and the swelling that will create will take two weeks to subside. I was stung 13 times at once one time, and 5 times another time. It's no fun.

The bees in a swarm have filled themselves with food before swarming, so they’re stuffed, so it’s hard to flex the abdomen to make a sting

Great point about the queen bee. The queen also uses her stinger inside her own hive. If the hive believes she is nearing the end of her reproductive abilities, they’ll rear other queens. She has to defend her position and quickly goes to kill the new queens when they emerge or she’ll be replaced. Beekeepers generally replace their queens every 2 years or so, and have to remove the old queen to prevent this behavior as well.

> That's why you don't go near a hive without protection.

This is true and recommended for just about everyone.. however, I have known some beekeepers that can do it. If you smoke the bees well, they’ll get calm enough that they won’t sting. It’s thought to be likely because the smoke covers pheromones, and also because the smoke causes the bees to begin hoarding honey in case they need to quickly leave a burning hive.

I was never brave enough to attempt it, however during my time beekeeping I was amazed at how magical smoke was. Picking up handfuls of bees in their hive and not being swarmed feels like a super power.

For some reason I was never afraid of bees. I have a cousin who keeps bees, and she showed me a bee hive once. Neither of use used any masks or gloves. I remember when she showed me the queen, and I was pointing at it to make sure I got it right, she told me to not touch her, because then the other bees will sense the foreign smell on her and will kill her. In any case, I was surrounded by thousands of bees, but none stang me or my cousin. There's some urban legend that bees smell you, and depending on the smell they decide to attack you or not. I suppose I drew the lucky lottery ticket.

Very interesting!

Don't wasps have a similar "swarm attack" mode that doesn't require individual wasps dying to spread pheromones? Something in the sting/venom itself?

I've been stung by wasp swarms twice, in the same area (they were protecting their nest, and please don't ask why it happened twice... we humans do indeed stumble with the same stone twice!). The wasps were very aggressive stinging near the same location in my arm, and it hurt a lot. I was stung in the same body part by the swarm, not in random locations.

No wasps were harmed during this accident.

>The queen almost certainly has to use her stinger when she exits her cocoon: to kill ther other queens

I think this is one of the more interesting differences. Plenty of species operate in groups. But its usually a dominant male with a harem. Bees and the like are unusual in that it's a dominant female.

I think it's related to the ease of reproduction. The females put relatively little into their off spring compared to a lion or even birds. It lets them to be essentially autonomous in reproduction which allows them to create offspring that are more like limbs.

Nice, another beek!

I have had a hive where I had queens that lived quite fine together. Weirdest hive as one of them was a caucasia and the other a cordovan. Never did get stung with those ladies.

Mine was by accident, but I hear that some beeks do it since cannot get the genetic combination, they just do it as a mechanical combo, to get preferred traits. Like buckfast and russian to help with swarming and defensiveness.

This maybe points to another theory (which may be entirely wrong, I'm just guessing!): honeybees die because they aren't supposed to attack each other. Like they can't be aggressively selfish because they'll just die in the process.

Wow that's super interesting! What a novel mechanism.

If you're careful with the index fingers of opposite hands, you can remove the stinger from your skin without killing the bee.

Nature’s design is often elegant. But also (sometimes) cruel.

Yeah, I was hoping the article would mention this, but no dice. :(

Read this in my early 20s and loved it. Many ideas that have stuck with me. Hoping to reread it with my wife soon, nearly 20 years later, and see how it aged.

Wasps and bees have different ecological constraints with different risks involved. There is no contradiction here. They evolved as the fittest in their own constraint set. If bees weren’t fit enough, they would have gone extinct and replaced by bees with non-barbed stingers. There is no magic that makes them survive.

Evolution doesn’t have any goals or agenda. That’s why whales still have vestigial hip bones despite having no hips whatsoever. Because it’s not a significant parameter in their survival. Same with barbed stingers of bees.

Love this comment. It highlights a major misunderstanding of biology that many people who didn't study it in depth have: that every, or most features of living beings do not have an "evolutionary explanation." T-rex arms aren't short so they can open flowers - they just happen to be small because that's the type of creature that happened to survive after a lot of changes.

> Why do species survive? Because they did, and because the objective of life is to survive. But why?

In evolutionary biology, that definitionally is the ultimate answer. One species survived, another didn’t. Sometimes that’s because the adaptation helped them outcompete, sometimes it’s because they were already competitive and this preexisting disadvantage from an earlier round didn’t hurt enough to matter. We can try to find intuitive explanations past that which feel satisfying but it’s always going to be a rough approximation.

Let’s use chess as an analogy. Allow an engine to analyze a position and tell us the best path forward. But why did it choose that line? We can (and do) come up with explanations that help us fit a move into our understanding of the game: moving this pawn allows that knight to occupy a better spot where it can exert its influence on the rest of the board, or whatever. But that’s merely a convenient simplification for our gut understanding. It’s not really the actual answer. The ultimate “why” is “because it produces the best possible eventual outcome no matter the response”.

The "why" questions people ask about evolutionary biology are the carry over of theology into the understanding of evolution. People still need to believe there is a fundamental reason the world is the way it is. A similar theological carry over is the belief that we are better suited to the environment we evolved in. This is akin to "golden age" thinking, that the world today is somehow not right and if we return to the origin things will be better.

At a fundamental level causality doesn't even really make sense in evolutionary biology. You can ask the question "what benefits do this feature provide", but you can never really say that's why they evolved. In the end you have the traits you do because, at point in the species development, they didn't make you die faster and some helped you survive better, but it's not really possible to disentangle these.

Likewise people don't really understand that in evolutionary processes both the species and the environment are constantly changing. The notion that a species is "adapted for a particular environment" is somewhat nonsensical because "the environment" is never really fixed.

Here's an explanation of how this works:

All creatures are very complicated. Thus reproduction doesn't produce perfect clones, "mutations" take place. This is largely because there are so many different ways to derive one individual out of two individuals' complex genitic material. This is all a feature. This is why individuals have unique characteristics. Think about how different humans are from each other, even though we're all humans. This same thing applies to all creatures. Every individual is different. Those who have "disabilities" (disadvantages in their context) are less likely to survive. So those with advantageous traits survive and pass their traits on through reproduction, making those specific traits more prevalent.

The answer to "why didn't x evolve to do y?" is usually just that that specific mutation might have never occurred or caught on randomly. This is also why different species do different things differently. It's all random mutations. Some were beneficial in their context and environment so those who had them were more likely to survive and pass those traits along.

It's not that "the objective of life is to survive" in a spiritual sense, it's that life randomly happens and some of it survives and it makes more life like itself. In some ways, I suppose the purpose of life is to create more life. Systems that replicate themselves successfully survive. We call these "life". It's really a linguistics thing.

Hope some of this makes sense. I enjoyed thinking about this.

> Any evolutionary explanation you give me is also falsified by the existence of another species with a different/opposite trait. Whatever explanation you give for a bee's barbed stinger is falsified by the wasp's non-barbed one.

The explanation in the article does not reduce to a "survival of the fittest" truism and is not falsified by this example. The article explains at great length why that is, specifically referring to that example.

I had a very similar feeling until I took a course with one of the leading researchers in the field of protein folding. Two things that he repeatedly mentioned stuck with me a lot:

Evolution is not the survival of the fittest but the not-dying of the unfit. That explains why we have so many different species in the same ecological niche. The example he used was different types of grass on the same field. All of those were fit enough to not die.

The second thing he always repeated was that biology only observes what does or at some point did work. That leads to a huge confirmation bias that research needs to be aware of. Two species might be very similar but just across different sides of the boundary of survival.

I think you misunderstood what people mean by "why" in the context of evolution.

For example, you ask a random person what his job is.

He: I fix TVs

You: Why?

He: Uh, that's what keeps a roof over me and keeps my family fed?

You: But clearly other humans do other jobs and still have roofs. So it's not a real "why". Your statement is falsified.

> Evolutionary explanations like these for "why" 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

How DNA works at molecular level is science. How creators became what they are now is history. History usually doesn't have the same level of falsifiability as science does.

It's not loading for me in Firefox on desktop either; I found the image in the source code if anyone is interested:

https://www.subanima.org/content/images/size/w1200/2021/11/b...

edit: looks intentional?

    /* Remove feature image from top of articles */
    .gh-article-image {
        display: none;
    }

Sometimes I observed how it worked after being stung by a bee. It is better to remove sting using force from one side. When two fingertips are used to remove a sting all venom is being pushed into the wound.

your comment was excellent.

I couldn't read past the article's pretentious opening.

The gate keeping of all that calculus for a CS degree is silly. Wasn’t the strongest at math, so grinned and bared but don’t really have a grasp of it anymore, and it would have been a shame to not have graduated with a CS degree because of it.

As an easily distracted high schooler just trying to enjoy one of his favorite classes, I discovered I could swat a flying bee dead with my folder. They were getting in through some gap in a window facing an alcove an I think we had four or five one year before Facilities fixed the problem.

It worked out, but you don’t really want to go squishing bees in an open area since they release chemicals that put their siblings on alert. If they stay put a glass and a piece of stiff paper are a better solution. But these were buzzing around my fellow students making everyone freak out.

basically you are Spiderman

I think you are missing a few points. First, is the adversarial nature of mate selection.

A female peacock who falls for a trick will have fewer offspring that survive. The discerning hen will do better. Honest communication works because it is backed up actual fitness. It doesn't require group selection.

Second, I think there is a lot more going on with respect to taxes. Taxes have existed for maybe 10,000 years. An armed man demanding half your stuff or they kill your family is a tax too. Same for a mature lion that eats what another animal killed. I would argue taxes are an inherent result of power imbalances among humans. Differences give rise to power differentials, which give rise to security concessions, which consolidate into kingdoms and nations.

> It’s because ultimately the species survives, not the individuals.

No, this is wrong. "Survival of the species" isn't a basis for selection. It will not lead to a gene becoming more prevalent in a population of interbreeding individuals.

Bees sacrifice themselves because they share genes with the queen; genes that are involved in this sacrifice increase their relative abundance in the bee gene pool by increasing the fitness of the superorganism that is the colony.

It's somewhat explained near the end of the article. Sex in bees (and ants) is weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system

Humans use XY system, so we share 50% of your genes with your children, parents and siblings (in average).

Bees and ants use X0 system. A female bee share 50% of your genes with their own daughters, 75% with their mother and 75% with their female parents and 75% with their female siblings (in average).

So, from the bee's genes point of view instead of having their own children it's better to kidnap their mother and force her to have more female children. And a consequence is that instead of running away to form their new family in a safe place it's better to die protecting their mother.

group selection works a lot better when the sacrificing individuals are sterile, with no other hope of passing on their genetics.

See also Eunuchs and Castration as a way to recreate a similar dynamic with humans. Castration had the fascinating ability to bind the interests of the Eunuchs more closely with the power structures and rules, by removing the option of family and progeny of their own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#Asia_and_Africa

[Edit] As crazydoggers points out, it is probably better to view this through the lens of kin selection, with reproducers as the evolutionary agents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42749677

“Group selection” is not a thing. The article hand waves this always with

> some biologists still get really triggered about group selection and deny its evolutionary importance

Which is dishonest at best. The vast majority of biologist have realized group selection doesn’t work as proposed. [0]

What people thought was group selection was just kin selection working over time.

All evolution works at the level of the gene. Genes “want” to reproduce more of themselves. And if the same gene is in a kin, then it can favor enhancing the survival of kin that carry copies of itself. At a macro level this can be misreported as group selection, but to be sure, the selection is happening at the level of the gene, and reaches at most to kin sharing genes.

The article then goes on to say

> The nice story I told above about the evolution of altruism could just have easily been applied to humans. Yet we do not exist in eusocial colonies, so there must be something else going on

And he then talks about gene selection and the fact that bees are haplodiploidy, which is indeed the cause of the “altruism” we see.

His dismissal of haplodiploidy at the end of the article is a weak argument. Just because haplodiploidy in other species doesn’t lead to eusocial groups, or that eusocial groups can occur without haplodiploidy are not sufficient arguments that dismiss the effects of haplodiploidy and kin selection favoring altruism in eusocial bees.

I highly recommend people interested in these topics to read the seminal Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. [1]

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

It requires such a depth of evolution as to make it absurd to imagine that the genus homo is the point at which altruism emerged. Animals care about each other.

Think about how most people are naturally scared of heights, or snakes. A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you play with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a snake.

The ones that aren't afraid of those things are more likely to die from falling off a cliff or being injected with venom.

I'm personally someone who is freaked out heavily by insects. I know logically a house centipede or a harmless spider can't hurt me, but seemingly my brain has something in it that overrides my entire body when I see one and disgusts me. Usually it's irrational, but it probably helps humanity on a larger scale to avoid the ones that are dangerous!

There's a lot about the humans body that naturally gives us non-logical instincts that help us to survive and breed. People like having sex, regardless of whether they want a baby. There's no logic to it, but we know what we like!

The more advanced we get, the more it becomes apparent that we're just monkeys in shoes.

Is that not essentially the only way that selection happens? You are just desvribing basic natural selection