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My understanding from the article and the general theory of Superorganisms is that it’s not exactly true that “dying when stinging confers fitness”. Rather, dyi

My understanding from the article and the general theory of Superorganisms is that it’s not exactly true that “dying when stinging confers fitness”. Rather, dying when stinging is just not a huge penalty when you’re talking about non-reproducing members of a colony. So, while it may be a good thing for bees to evolve the ability to survive stinging, the selective pressure is not as large as one might intuitively expect. Maybe a better title for the post would be something like, “Isn’t it weird that bees die when they sting? Shouldn’t they have evolved away from that?”

thaumasiotes 2y ago
Well, there's a larger problem in the post. The primary reason that a bee dies when it stings you is that you kill the bee. A bee stinging an inanimate hunk of meat is unlikely to die. But they can die, and yeah, a big part of the reason why is that dying isn't as large of a cost for bees as you might expect from a human perspective. And looping back, another part is that given the very high risk of being intentionally killed when stinging an enemy who you want to sting, improving the much smaller rate of accidental death isn't really worth much. But even though it isn't worth much, it's worth something, and work has been done on the project.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Per everything I've ever read on this, a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive. It will either try to pull itself out and disembowel itself, or it will remain stack and die of hunger. What makes you think a bee that stings, say, a dog that can't swat it will then go on to survive?
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Watching a youtube video by a beekeeper demonstrating that a bee stuck in his arm will gently wiggle itself around until it can pull free and fly away. Between that one guy with his live demonstration and his plentiful experience being stung by bees, and you with everything you've ever read, I'm obviously going to stick with him. You should read better sources. Here, an example of how bees behave after stinging meat: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7wH8dYiGbig https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7wH8dYiGbig Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo A bee that stings meat will pull itself out unharmed, if you let it.
    - cryptonector 2y ago
      Not at all my experience. My Italian bees are pretty hot though, so that may be why. My Russian bees are much nicer, and I've never been even stung by one of them, so maybe that's it. My hot bees will rip their stinger out within a second, and they emit a very particular frequency that I feel and that lets me know very quickly that I'm in trouble -- to be fair I've only experienced that vibration a handful of times because I've gotten much better at not leaving any exposed skin or any way for them to get in my suit. All those bee rescue videos you see where the beekeeper doesn't wear a veil are not telling you the whole story. Before they go work on extracting the hive they'll first check that those bees are not hot and angry. If those bees are africanized then they'll use a suit and smoke and they will not bother making or posting a video about it. I.e., those videos are all cherry-picked experiences, all the good ones.
      - thaumasiotes 2y ago
        Does any of that support the idea that "a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive"? This is clearly false. Why repeat it?
        cryptonector 2y ago
        The ones that manage to leave the stinger in never survive in my case. Idk what to tell you. That's just my experience. Can they survive? Yes, they can. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? No, I don't think so.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      Here is an example of a bee disemboweling itself: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/u9YDf9w6Ps8 https://m.youtube.com/shorts/u9YDf9w6Ps8 Here is another one: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fMxZ4vKmOZo https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fMxZ4vKmOZo So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written? For example, this article interviews two bee scientists that confirm that the majority of honeybees die via self-disembowelment after stinging a human: https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-die-after-stinging https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-die-after-stinging However, they mention an interesting other thing, that may actually help explain what happens much better: bees don't die when they sting other insects or spiders, they only die when their needles get stuck in our thick skin. So perhaps the most likely explanation for the evolution and survival of the barbed stinger trait is that it's beneficial when bees fight their common enemies, and that bees simply don't interact that much with mammals and their thick skins.
tsimionescu 2y ago
This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting. I'm not at all sure this is true - I don't know the evolutionary history of bees, but it seems unlikely that some kind of solitary proto-bees would have died after a sting. And even if this were true, we should still wonder why that proto-bee evolved to have this suicide stinger in the first place. "It's not a big disadvantage to survival" can't be the explanation for a trait, unless that trait is a remnant from an ancestor where it brought an advantage (like the hip bones in whales - hip bones are obviously useful in land-based mammals, and whales are descendants of those). Sp the question is: why did some organism ever evolve a stinger that kills it, how was that ever something that made some organism survive better than its brethren that didn't have this trait?
- xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
  > This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting. I don't see how you arrived at this conclusion, this logic seems to be flawed. Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it. Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are. Not everything is optimal in the extreme. For all we know there have been many, many bees without barbs, but the bar to pass that on as an advantage is very high. The odds of a bee reproducing aren't even that high to begin with.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    > Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it. If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in some individual bees, but many other bees didn't have them, like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then I'd agree. But a trait can't be universal in a species, and even in many related species, unless there is explicit selective pressure for that trait, or if it's a remnant from a common ancestor that had it. Your high cholesterol predisposition example is actually perfect, it shows what happens with traits that don't have significant pressure for or against them: they remain confined to a subset of the population. > Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are. They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the organism still viable is extremely low.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

Well, there's a larger problem in the post. The primary reason that a bee dies when it stings you is that you kill the bee. A bee stinging an inanimate hunk of meat is unlikely to die. But they can die, and yeah, a big part of the reason why is that dying isn't as large of a cost for bees as you might expect from a human perspective. And looping back, another part is that given the very high risk of being intentionally killed when stinging an enemy who you want to sting, improving the much smaller rate of accidental death isn't really worth much. But even though it isn't worth much, it's worth something, and work has been done on the project.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Per everything I've ever read on this, a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive. It will either try to pull itself out and disembowel itself, or it will remain stack and die of hunger. What makes you think a bee that stings, say, a dog that can't swat it will then go on to survive?
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Watching a youtube video by a beekeeper demonstrating that a bee stuck in his arm will gently wiggle itself around until it can pull free and fly away. Between that one guy with his live demonstration and his plentiful experience being stung by bees, and you with everything you've ever read, I'm obviously going to stick with him. You should read better sources. Here, an example of how bees behave after stinging meat: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7wH8dYiGbig https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7wH8dYiGbig Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo A bee that stings meat will pull itself out unharmed, if you let it.
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    Not at all my experience. My Italian bees are pretty hot though, so that may be why. My Russian bees are much nicer, and I've never been even stung by one of them, so maybe that's it. My hot bees will rip their stinger out within a second, and they emit a very particular frequency that I feel and that lets me know very quickly that I'm in trouble -- to be fair I've only experienced that vibration a handful of times because I've gotten much better at not leaving any exposed skin or any way for them to get in my suit. All those bee rescue videos you see where the beekeeper doesn't wear a veil are not telling you the whole story. Before they go work on extracting the hive they'll first check that those bees are not hot and angry. If those bees are africanized then they'll use a suit and smoke and they will not bother making or posting a video about it. I.e., those videos are all cherry-picked experiences, all the good ones.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Does any of that support the idea that "a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive"? This is clearly false. Why repeat it?
      - cryptonector 2y ago
        The ones that manage to leave the stinger in never survive in my case. Idk what to tell you. That's just my experience. Can they survive? Yes, they can. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? No, I don't think so.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Here is an example of a bee disemboweling itself: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/u9YDf9w6Ps8 https://m.youtube.com/shorts/u9YDf9w6Ps8 Here is another one: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fMxZ4vKmOZo https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fMxZ4vKmOZo So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written? For example, this article interviews two bee scientists that confirm that the majority of honeybees die via self-disembowelment after stinging a human: https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-die-after-stinging https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-die-after-stinging However, they mention an interesting other thing, that may actually help explain what happens much better: bees don't die when they sting other insects or spiders, they only die when their needles get stuck in our thick skin. So perhaps the most likely explanation for the evolution and survival of the barbed stinger trait is that it's beneficial when bees fight their common enemies, and that bees simply don't interact that much with mammals and their thick skins.

tsimionescu 2y ago

This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting. I'm not at all sure this is true - I don't know the evolutionary history of bees, but it seems unlikely that some kind of solitary proto-bees would have died after a sting. And even if this were true, we should still wonder why that proto-bee evolved to have this suicide stinger in the first place. "It's not a big disadvantage to survival" can't be the explanation for a trait, unless that trait is a remnant from an ancestor where it brought an advantage (like the hip bones in whales - hip bones are obviously useful in land-based mammals, and whales are descendants of those). Sp the question is: why did some organism ever evolve a stinger that kills it, how was that ever something that made some organism survive better than its brethren that didn't have this trait?

xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
> This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms, so that the obvious survival disadvantage that dying after a successful attack brings was compensated by the hive life rather than by surviving the sting. I don't see how you arrived at this conclusion, this logic seems to be flawed. Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it. Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are. Not everything is optimal in the extreme. For all we know there have been many, many bees without barbs, but the bar to pass that on as an advantage is very high. The odds of a bee reproducing aren't even that high to begin with.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  > Of course it can be an explanation for a trait. If you are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, is that advantageous or disadvantageous? There's simply too little pressure to do anything about it. If barbed stingers were a variation that occurred in some individual bees, but many other bees didn't have them, like predisposition to cholesterol in humans, then I'd agree. But a trait can't be universal in a species, and even in many related species, unless there is explicit selective pressure for that trait, or if it's a remnant from a common ancestor that had it. Your high cholesterol predisposition example is actually perfect, it shows what happens with traits that don't have significant pressure for or against them: they remain confined to a subset of the population. > Phenotypes aren't required to change in the smallest imaginable step. It's not implausible that nature decided "hey this next bee gets some furry yellow stripes, but also barbs" and here we are. They generally are. The likelihood of a random mutation that produces several phenotypal changes but leaves the organism still viable is extremely low.