Are bees aware about the consequences of using their stinger on a large target? Consequently, are they aware that stinging smaller animals won’t cause them to die?

Question

Do they instinctively “know” they will die by stinging a human?

In: Biology

Answer 1

The simple answer is no, they are not. I’ll assume you’re referring to honeybees since the fact they’re a colony superorganism is important.

When a guard bee identifies a threat to the colony, whether it’s another bee that smells wrong, or a wasp or a badger, she’ll first try to defuse the situation by chasing off the perceived threat. If you’ve ever gotten too close to a hive, you may have noticed that one or perhaps two bees buzz you first, and then they’ll head-butt you to try to get you to move away. Only then will they actually sting.

Once they sting, the chemicals take over. The venom contains an alarm pheromone which contains isopentyl acetate which smells like pears (to me, at least – other beekeepers have said it smells like bananas). This is produced by a gland next to the sting and it puts all the other bees onto DEFCON 1. Obviously they won’t all attack, but a few will, focusing on the original sting area, stinging that again. If the threat still doesn’t retreat, more bees will attack and this continues to escalate. At this point, even if the threat does retreat, they’ll follow and may sting even when 100m from the hive, but they’ll certainly head-butt for some distance.

Occasionally a hive will turn nasty, primarily because the queen’s genetics are “bad” – this often happens because the bee strain is hybridised with another strain. One nasty hive I had decided I was the enemy on the day I had a short-sleeved tee shirt under my bee jacket, so I got about 20 stings on my arms (for full protection you need 2 layers).

All of the above behaviours are caused by completely automatic responses to the alarm pheromone with no recognition of the fact that stinging the target will result in their death. In fact, when the sting is ripped out, it’s accompanied by a ganglion of nerve tissue which controls the continued pumping of venom into the recipient which indicates that they have actually evolved to perform this post-mortem attack on anything that threatens the colony, i.e. their death is part of the Great Bee Plan.

TL;DR – they don’t care – it’s all controlled by chemical messages.