Why do bees sting even though they would die after?
In: Biology
Idk, but I did bee keeping commercially for a while, and virtually every bee that stung me ripped out its stinger attached to their stomach. You can then see their pouch still pulsating up to 8 minutes slowly letting out venom until you pull the stinger out. The venom they let out also contains a pheromone that has a sweet aroma and alerts the bees to target you as a threat. Very rarely did I ever get stung by a bee and not see this happen every time. So on one hand, I wanna say perhaps they do know they will die, or maybe they don’t. Either way, they will protect their queen and die for her. So in a way, maybe they do know? The most I’ve been stung in one sitting was 21 times. I don’t recommend.
It’s for the good of the hive
And they don’t know that they will die and actively make that sacrifice even though they don’t understand they will die
I think there’s something about this in Dawkins book the selfish gene. If I remember right all the bees are related genetically, like siblings.. so they are willing to die to protect eachother.
Losing the stinger isn’t standard. Human skin is thick enough that it holds on to the stinger well enough that when we slap the bee off, it pulls out the stinger. If you can manage to not swat the bee away, it will eventually spin its stinger out and fly away intact.
Bees are absolutely able to survive stinging a person – they just need a bit of time to get unstuck. People seldom give them that time.
DNA is like the instructions for building you. It decides things like your eye color and your hair color—everything that makes you, *you*. But DNA’s main job isn’t just to make you; it’s to keep making more of itself in new creatures. A long time ago, DNA figured out that it could work better by teaming up. Instead of just making copies of itself, it would mix with other DNA to make new babies that are stronger.
For bees, something really interesting happened with their DNA. Girl bees, like worker bees, realized that instead of having babies themselves, they could help their mother, the queen bee, have lots and lots of babies. The worker bees are more related to their sisters than they would be to their own kids, so it’s better for them to help their mom make more sisters than to have babies themselves!
That’s why worker bees don’t have babies, and they even sacrifice themselves by stinging to protect the hive. When they sting to protect the queen and the hive, they are making sure their sisters—and the queen—can keep passing on the same DNA. It might seem strange, but they do it because helping their family is the best way for their DNA to survive and reproduce.
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Hey, finally something I can answer since I’m a beekeeper. The Western Honey Bee is what I keep, so my answer is specific to that species. Broadly speaking, the important units in bees are the hives or families, not individual workers, so the loss of some of them is not particularly impactful. To be specific, during the “season,” broadly April to mid-September in my climate, the average worker lives only two to four weeks. Thus, any losses, as long as the Queen and some number of attendants to actually care for the eggs remain, can be made good with human support. Since the Queen does not leave the hive except at the beginning of her life a couple of times, she does not use her stinger for defensive purposes. She only uses it as a weapon in dealing with other larvae that would develop into queens until only one remains.
They dont normally know that human skin is thick enough for their stingers to get stuck, some can figure it out, and will walk in circles to get their stinger free, but after they sting and fly away, their stinger stays and rips them open to die.
It has been suggested that it is a hygiene reason. Bee hives persist and dieing after stinging prevents the risk of infection being taken back to the hive
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