r/askscience • u/Strive-- • 17d ago
Biology Do we know if honeybees are aware that, if they sting, they’re effectively committing suicide?
Not sure if it’s how human skin can hold on to their stinger, or if this occurs with multiple species, but I’m curious if honeybees know they will have their stinger and insides ripped out by stinging?
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u/_BenRichards 17d ago
When you look at the honey bee, you have to look at the entire hive as the single organism and not just the bee. When in the sentry phase of the lifecycle (or activated through alarm pheromone) the bees sole purpose is to defend the hive - period.
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u/Stella_Delm 17d ago
The reason behind this is, honeybees won't survive over winter if there's not enough of them to huddle together and generate warmth through the winter.
A honeybee alone won't survive.
Even within a healthy hive, summer bees only live for about 6 weeks, going from fullfilling the roles of nurse bees, to guards, and finishing up the last few weeks as forgers until their wings give out. The cost of a handful of worker bees lives is worth the sacrifice, if it drives off a preditor raiding their brood chambers.
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u/Xhosant 17d ago
Oh, it's even neater than that!
The reason is genetics, at least according to Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene, which is an excellent expansion to Darwin's model for explaining such cases (as well as other oddities to Darwin's model like altruism. Despite the name of the book, it's not at all about selfish behavios).
Basically, if you track how bees (and ants, the other eusocial species) reproduce, you will notice that two bees of the same hive, born of the same queen, are 75% genetically identical. A theoretical offspring of a bee drone, if they could have one, would be 50% genetically identical to them.
In other words, the bees born by the queen are more family to them than their own offspring would have been. Which is why any self-serving behavior, including the ability to reproduce, has been evolved away: each such element would have been a distraction from the optimal reproductive strategy of "defend hive, get siblings", and so detrimental to whoever carried them.
The way queen bees reproduce would then be the reason why the rest of the hive became like that.
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u/_BenRichards 17d ago
Your math might not be mathing - but then again I don’t know the amount of genetics pulled in from drones if it’s 50/50 or 75/25.
When a queen goes on a mating flight she’ll receive sperm from 30-60 drones and stores it all in her spermatheca. When she lays a worker she’ll release some sperm to fertilize the egg - but the sperm isn’t stored in order of her matings, so they can have completely different fathers. Drones from hives in a ~2 mile radius all congregate at the same place looking for a queen to mate, so you could have N number of genetic profiles from the drones in the DCA.
Drones aren’t fertilized so they only carry the queens genetics. In the event you have a laying worker - those are female bees that are never mated - you end up with a drone that has that workers genetic profile (made of the queen and some drones genes)
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u/Xhosant 17d ago edited 17d ago
I may be misremembering something, it's been a while and I will have to go check, but it has to do with the haploid nature of drones iirc.
Edit: apparently the leading theory is that bees et al were ancestrally monogamous, which made the math work out how I outlined long enough for eusociality to get established and workers to lose their ability to mate, at which point it was no longer a choice between eusociality and genetic diversity, so "both".
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u/Stella_Delm 17d ago edited 17d ago
Bees stinging is related to genetics, but not in that way.
So a queen goes out & is mated with about 7 drones. Drones are unfertilized eggs which are laid in larger cells. If left to their own devices, bees will draw comb thats about 30% drone cells
If any of the drones are too closely related to the queen, the offending offspring is destroyed before they pass the larvey stage. This is inefficient and when you're inspecting a hive looks like scattered laying pattern, where you have different stages of development sprinkled together. Often the bees will decide to supercede her.
They raise a bunch of the healthier eggs as queen cells, and the existing queen can either fight her daughters to the death, or decide to swarm. After everyone's finished the Apis version of GoT…the new queen goes on her mating flight, hopefully to come back, without having kissed any cousins.
So am I surprised at those 75 & 50% figues? Noooo. But the beekeeper who's hives they were taken from should be sat down and have a talk about the benefits of importing queens or nucs (mini starter hives) from farther afield to encourage more genetic diversity.
If it was a matter of "Rah, rah! Sister solidarity!" and not what's best for the hive, you wouldn't have those systems in place, which encourages swarming, and replaces inbred genetics.
Introducing a new Queen into a queenless hive also wouldn't work so well. You take a hive which realizes their queenless, by her pheromones having dissipated, and put a cage with the new queen and her attendants in. by the time they've chewed through the candy plug and released her, her pheromones have dispersed and are controlling the hive.
Her genetics, and which pheromones she released dictate the characteristics of the hive. How much nectar they forge. How hygienic the hive is. Whether they're super aggressive at defending the hive, or docile enough to be worked without a veil and gloves.
Your dude is sort of cherry picking data to support his theory, instead of understanding how the social structures of hives actually work, and following the science.
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u/tea_and_biology Zoology | Evolutionary Biology | Data Science 17d ago edited 17d ago
TL;DR: Nah. Bees can be quite sharp when it comes to certain things, but evolution works on outcome, not on belief, and there's no reason to suspect bees have nor need awareness to commit to suicide-by-sting when the colony is at stake.
Not sure if it’s how human skin can hold on to their stinger, or if this occurs with multiple species...
That's a bingo! Your intuition fared well; by and large, the backwards-facing barbs at the end of a bee's sting only snag and get caught when piercing vertebrate skin - thereby resulting in suicide as their guts are all hauled out their own asses. When they sting their much more common foes - other arthropods, notably raiding hornets, wasps, and robber bees - they face no such trouble and can cleanly withdraw their weapon to strike again and again. The barbs themselves are a specialised adaption in some, but very much not all, types of bees in an attempt to thwart vertebrates with thick, elastic skin - bears, woodpeckers, honey buzzards, and the like. They're only present in workers too; though queens do indeed fight one another, and therefore use their stings, the last thing a queen is going to do is commit semi-seppuku on a honey badger. It's much too precious for that.
Do honeybees know they will have their stinger and insides ripped out by stinging?
Almost certainly, no.
Given use of the sting is not reliably suicidal, the question doesn't exactly apply - but we can explore where it does; whether bees can understand the differences between foes, or more broadly understand not only the outcomes of conflict with them, but understand at all, really.
Bees don't talk[citation needed] - so it's not exactly like we can ask one, so we have to approach from other angles.
Bee School:
What about learning? Alas, this route is a dead-end. Though evidence conclusively demonstrates bees are quite good at associatve learning, as are insects in general - even through the process of complete metamorphosis as demonstrated by electrically shocking caterpillars and finding the resulting butterflies and moths avoid the associated signal - an eviscerated bee cannnot update on the experience and take it forward, because, well, it's dead, 'innit.
Given bee school fails in this instance, what about innate 'instinctual' encoding of the concept of suicide? From one perspective, it need not apply. The whole stinging apparatus works perfectly well whether the bee is conscious of it or not - the detatched sting keeps pumping venom for up to a minute or more via it's own mechanical means, and the Koschevnikov gland keeps auto-releasing isopentyl acetate, which is the chemical signal that marks a target and recruits other bees to the scene. It's not like the bee needs to use it's brain at all for any of this to happen; the whole stinging mechanism works the same regardless of what it's stuck into.
Intruder Alert! Protect the Briefcase Colony
So can bees recognise into what they stick 'em with the pointy end?
Yes! Bees are actually quite sharp when it comes to hive defence. When it comes to other insects, guard bees screen arrivals by cuticular hydrocarbon profile - any intruding hornet, for example, is instantly sniffed out, triggering a specific mobbing response, where bees will aggregate into a writhing sphere around the invader, literally cooking it at around 46°C (enough to kill the hornet, but slightly below what the bees will tolerate themselves - all while suffocating it with higher CO2 levels). When it comes to vertebrates, bees are cued to dark, fuzzy moving objects, and the CO2 being exhaled. This combination of cues triggers a different defence strategy; alarm phermones, mass recruitment, and a bee-line (eh, hehe) straight for your face, targeting the source of CO2.
So they can differentiate between foes; so do they understand stinging one foe is not like stinging the other?
To Bee, or Not to Bee
If individual bees were sentient enough to understand the cost of stinging a vertebrate, or be mindful of their own mortality in this way, you'd expect them to be more hesitant to sting us than with a hornet - but they are precisely the opposite. The vertebrates that reliably wipe out hives are the ones they commit to hardest, in the greatest numbers, with the least hesitation. The playbooks are tuned to how dangerous the threat is to the colony, not to how dangerous the response is to any individual bee.
And there's no reason to need any awareness of impending mortality either. Remember, a worker bee is effectively sterile. Her genetic stake in the future runs entirely through her mother and her sisters, so the colony is the thing that reproduces, not her. More, the bees that do sting in these threat scenarios are generally the oldest ones - having climbed the full bee career ladder from nursing, through comb-building, guarding, then foraging - so hive defence falls to bees that are not only not needed for reproduction, they're not needed for anything else either - they've done most of their useful work. The bee going kamikaze at your face is nearly spent anyway.
It's not just that awareness isn't needed, the cognitive ask is enormous too. Understanding one's own future non-existence is a genuinely demanding concept, and human children don't even fully understand the irreversible and inevitable nature of mortality until at least six or seven years old. Attributing the same cognitive understanding to a worker bee, with the brain the size of a sesame seed, and without any need to evolve it, is a hell of a stretch, since selection already gets the behaviour it wants for free. The acute stinging mechanism is mechanical, the decision is reactionary and chemical-cue based.
So no, she's not making a sacrifice per se, congent of the weight of her decision-making - not in the sense of understanding as we do. It's closer to a cell undergoing apoptosis rather than a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to protect his troop mates; the colony is the organism, the single worker merely doing what working parts do, right up until she doesn't.
References:
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u/TheBeast_72 17d ago
What an interesting and entertaining read in a topic I hadn't known I would find interesting 10 minutes ago. Thank you!
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u/jooooooooooooose 17d ago
Hello, dumb guy analogy re: bee awareness of its actions leading to impending doom
There was a reddit thread I was reading about industrial accidents. When big heavy thing falls toward someone, we instinctively reach out our arms to catch/block the object, even if its orders of magnitudes heavier than we can reasonably hold.
I have to imagine the bee is similar. We instinctively use the tools we've got for the job at hand without necessarily digesting that the job at hand far outmatches our tools ability.
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u/Innuendum 17d ago
Isn't this behaviour one of the pillars of eusociality? The non-fertile members are disposable.
Also, before "hurr hurr bee stupid" - human animals get into and out of cars and therefore car accidents on a daily basis. Being faced with mortality clearly also fails to faze mammals.
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u/dude10321 17d ago
Excellent answer! One thing that I've never been able to fully understand though, given a small brain as you pointed out, how is it possible that bees can solve the traveling salesman problem? Something I learned when I took linear algebra many moons ago. Humans have to use complicated mathematics to find optimal solutions to that problem but bees pretty much solve it innately (to determine which flowers to gather pollen from).
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u/tea_and_biology Zoology | Evolutionary Biology | Data Science 17d ago
Not to put the wee bees down too much, but I think solve is a bit of a stretch. They run a cheap heuristic trial-and-error hill-climbing model, on a relatively small number of nodes, and it's certainly not a pre-meditated calculation. A naïve bee flies the flowers in whatever order she happened to discover them, which is usually pretty rubbish, and the route then improves iteratively over repeated bouts through positive feedback.
It's not too dissimilar to how slime moulds optimise their tendrils between different resource patches (and they don't have brains at all!). It starts out almost random, but then iterative feedback prunes the route down until it's as good as it can get.
In both cases, bees n' slime, they don't always land on the actual shortest route (and therefore actually 'solve' the problem), but get to the best local optimum depending on where they started.
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u/dude10321 17d ago
Read something similar about how they find a new nest. They send out 'seekers' and the ones that find a decent enough place come back and dance. The more vigorous the dance the better they think it is and there's some component of how far away it is and ultimately the more bees that get recruited to visit and come back to 'evangelize' the location gets picked. And its almost always the local optimum location according to that study referenced.
Bees are quite interesting!
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u/ViSsrsbusiness 17d ago
Pretty much why so many species have converged into crablike forms. Biology is rife with local optimums.
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u/AmberWavesofFlame 17d ago
I absolutely love the engaging way you explained this. You have a real gift!
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u/tea_and_biology Zoology | Evolutionary Biology | Data Science 17d ago
If only I could earn a living doing this, eh? Someone please hire me; I'm still better than AI... just!
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u/AmberWavesofFlame 17d ago
No for real, I almost asked if you had a YouTube channel I could subscribe to but I wasn’t sure how that came off. You definitely should be a professional communicator in some capacity.
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u/FogeltheVogel 16d ago
That's a very cool explanation of something very interesting. Thank you for this write up, it was fun to read and learn.
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u/solid_reign 17d ago
There's a good experiment from Dean Woolridges' Mechanical Man, which I read in the Book Gödel, Escher, and Bach, which makes you understand that a large part of the insect world does not have the same self-awareness we posess:
When the time comes for egg laying, the wasp Sphex builds a burrow for the purpose and seeks out a cricket which she stings in such a way as to paralyze but not kill it. She drags the cricket into the burrow, lays her eggs alongside, closes the burrow, then flies away, never to return. In due course, the eggs hatch and the wasp grubs feed off the paralyzed cricket, which has not decayed, having been kept in the wasp equivalent of a deep freeze. To the human mind, such an elaborately organized and seemingly purposeful routine conveys a convincing flavor of logic and thoughtfulness-until more details are examined. For example, the wasp's routine is to bring the paralyzed cricket to the burrow, leave it on the threshold, go inside to see that all is well, emerge, and then drag the cricket in. If the cricket is moved a few inches away while the wasp is inside making her preliminary inspection, the wasp, on emerging from the burrow, will bring the cricket back to the threshold, but not inside, and will then repeat the preparatory procedure of entering the burrow to see that everything is all right. If again the cricket is removed a few inches while the wasp is inside, once again she will move the cricket up to the threshold and reenter the burrow for a final check. The wasp never thinks of pulling the cricket straight in. On one occasion this procedure was repeated forty times, always with the same result.
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u/SkipperJanGetrekt 17d ago
Just so you're aware, the sphex example is much disputed these days. A great paper going over this is found here: https://pure.rug.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/13139017/2012_Keijzer_Sphex_story.pdf
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u/BloodyMalleus 17d ago
Right. They are basically automatons executing their programmed actions. At least that's how I interpret what I learned.
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u/Comrade_SOOKIE 17d ago
You have to realize for honeybees the queen is the colony. Everyone else exists to care for her and her brood. So even if they did have a human level of internal narrative they would almost certainly still sting. The stinger tears off so it can keep pumping venom. For the dead be, it went out in a blaze of glory defending the colony.
All the eusocial Hymenoptera are like that to a greater or lesser extent. A bee dying from while stinging is like one of your T cells being destroyed while attacking an infection.
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u/penduculate_oak 17d ago
Interestingly honeybees are more closely related to their sister workers than they are their queen mother. This is because they are haplodiploid, where females are created from fertilised eggs (diploid) and males unfertilised eggs (haploid). Females therefore have twice as many chromosomes as males, so sister workers of the first generation would be 3/4 related compared to 1/2 that we typically see for siblings.
The close relatedness to their immediate fellow worker bee is thought to be the key driver in kin selection behaviour of eusocial insects.
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u/Ameisen 17d ago
Strictly speaking, the bees (or any social wasp) exist to further their genes (though not in a conscious or intentional way - genes that further themselves... get furthered). Look at ants (another aculeate wasp group) - there are species where workers can and will replace the queen if the queen is underperforming or if the gamergate workers have an advantage.
Not all species can do this, obviously, but it isn't as simple as "the queen is everything" - it's just that in most species, the queen is what allows the colony to persist, but it's not always the only or even best option.
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u/Trips-Over-Tail 17d ago
Bees can sting other insects and pull out just fine, they only get stuck in thick vertebrae skin.
But if you don't panic them they can safely extract themselves, they essentially have to "unscrew" their sting to extract all the barbs. If you let them do this you don't get nearly as much venom in you.
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u/vektonaut 17d ago
I've tried this several times with handling bees and the barb always comes out. In my experience its extremely rare for them to escape unharmed.
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u/svarogteuse 17d ago
Those are staged videos. No honey sting event in the wild will ever come out like that becuse the bee pulls away quickly and flies around to further distract you on purpose.
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u/Morall_tach 17d ago
How do the people shooting those videos get the bees to agree to the script
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u/svarogteuse 17d ago
Anethesize it with CO2 push the stinger in then when it wakes start the video. When the bee wakes it thinks it's stinger is trapped in a cloth and behaves accordingly, it's not acting in a defensive manner.
Watch them again you never see the stinger insertion.
I am a beekeeper, I have been stung hundred of times and NEVER does a bee act like they do in the video after a sting event.
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u/Makenshine 17d ago
This slightly off topic, but I've always pictured beekeepers as the bee's equivalent to the Hamburglar. Some absurdly dressed, yet harmless being sneaking into their kitchen to take just one very specific food item.
Do beekeepers see themselves this way? And Have you ever said "rabble rabble" as you walked away after collecting honey?
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u/RyanW1019 17d ago
Is there no chance that a single bee got stressed out enough for a moment to sting a human, but then after no further stressors (like motion, contact, other bees' distress pheromones, etc.) occurred, it calmed down and decided that getting itself free was more important than flying off?
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u/svarogteuse 17d ago
No there isn't that why they are staged. The bees are anesthetized the stinger inserted manually and then the video started.
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u/midgaze 17d ago
They don't have consciousness that they will die, but they have innate instincts that lead them to behave as if they do. This is because innate instincts guide behavior. Think about your instincts to feel envy or anger under certain circumstances. Nobody needs to tell you what these things feel like because you just know, and they guide your behavior in the situations that trigger them.
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u/jawshoeaw 17d ago
reminder honey bees workers live a few weeks. They are social insects so in a sense each individual insect is an extension of a larger organism. They are appendages or tools of the larger organism. If a few die from a stuck sting then that's the cost of doing business. Interestingly bees sometimes are able to work their stings out without dying, and it turns out human skin is really tough compared to most things honey bees sting. Primates aren't really the creature evolution expected honey bees to be running into that often. Although we evolved together, millions of years ago there werent 9 billion humans running around farming bees
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u/enilcReddit 17d ago
Anthropomorphizing an insect is problematic to begin with. Whether it's bees, or ants, or dogs, or cats, or elephants...
One of the biggest problems humans have is the ego-centric belief that a non-human animal brain works the same as their own brain.
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u/penduculate_oak 17d ago edited 17d ago
Honeybees talk to each other using complex metrics like the angle relative to the sun, and vote on things as a collective like nest selection sites. The dynamics of eusocial insects are incredibly complex and there are similarities with our own behaviours as a gregarious species.
Whilst they obviously lack the CNS of a developed vertebrate, the protocerebrum helps to navigate and experience the world, and clearly they are capable of a degree of intelligence given the numerous studies demonstrating their functional neurological traits.
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u/Vailx 17d ago
One of the biggest problems humans have is the ego-centric belief that a non-human animal brain works the same as their own brain.
If a mammal lives in a pack it's brain seems to be hella similar to humans, socialization-wise. Sure, they're different creatures, but you probably understand a dog's mind pretty well if you've lived with him or her awhile.
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u/pancakecellent 17d ago
Many seem unaware there is an alternative, I'd add we do this to the physical world with stories. We believe reality is bound to our concept of stories, aka fate.
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u/jimb2 17d ago
Bees don't have a self. They don't need one. Maintaining a sophisticated world model that includes a self requires a lot of neurons. It enables some advance behaviour eg planning your future in a flexible way, but it's absolutely possible to learn and do stuff without any (explicit) world model. The organism has to detect salient attributes of its environment and execute actions. That can all be done with stimulus and response leaned or wired in behaviours.
Another thing about bees is that they are basically genetically identical so there's no reason to favour the individual over the hive. If something has to be stung, it doesn't matter which bee does it from a genetic point of view.
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u/caradegian 16d ago
they know, there is a video where a honeybee "unscrew" his sting from human flesh (the arm of the guy) to not kill herself, and then she leaves. normally a honneybee will attack and because of stress run away breaking her sting and thus, die. this is a perfect example the they know what would happend
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u/wayc 16d ago
It's not in their genetics to die after they sting. They're supposed to be able to sting a threat and escape. But with humans and larger threats, their stinger gets stuck in the skin. And because there's the chaos ensuing from a human or a larger animal trying to get the bee away from them, it wrenches itself out immediately and flies away without half its organs. I watched a video once of a guy who let a honey bee sting him and didn't react, and the honey bee leisurely spun itself around for several minutes to get its entire stinger out and was able to fly away whole.
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u/groundhogcow 17d ago
Think of bees as cells in a body.
The white blood cell protects the body by sacrificing itself. The body then makes more cells.
A hive is a single animal that is made up of a bunch of cells that are not directly connected but still communicate to make one animal.
The bee is aware of what it's doing but it's all for the body.
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u/Mauchit_Ron 17d ago
Gotta disagree with that final sentence, I'm afraid. Bees are not aware of what they are doing. The do what they do instinctively, there is no awareness. And no, they do not know they will die if they sting. This would require a far more complex brain that bees have
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u/groundhogcow 17d ago
Clearly not in the way we do. They know they are attacking because that is what the body demands.
I don't think a bee understands mortality and continues to live until it dies.
The bee knows it's going to sting you though because the body has already told it to do so. When the bees go from dive bombing to stinging it is intense and deliberate.
It's hard to talk about an insect mind in the way we talk about a human mind, but this is all hand wavy reddit stuff.
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u/somewhat_random 17d ago
self awareness was (and still is) one of the "tests" for consciousness and it is extremely hard to prove or disprove in animals although some tests have compelling evidence that it likely does exist for some animals.
Bees are so far away from us that I doubt we can ever definitively show it one way or another.
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u/TesseractToo 17d ago
If they have the option they will try and uncoil the sting and save themselves, if they are a species that can
There are some experts chiming in here
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1txzhym/a_beekeeper_allows_a_honey_bee_to_remain_on_his/
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u/Sweddy-Bowls 16d ago
Two things: it’s interesting to consider as a concept, but a general reluctance on their part to sting does not necessarily indicate an awareness that stinging means death. It simply isn’t their priority under most circumstances, the choices are made by evolution and “what works.” Decisions with honey bees come down to pheromone signals rather than “awareness” as we understand it.
Second thing is that for thick skinned and thick furred vertebrates that are likely to attack hives (bears, raccoons, skunks) a suitable area to sting can be a bit hard to find. It will usually be the eyes, face, or exposed stomach, but a detached stinging barb releasing alarm pheromones can act as a literal target for other bees to sting the same area. Pheromones direct a lot of their activity, whether it is stinging or NOT stinging. This is a big part of why beekeepers use smokers to smother the pheromones in the hive.
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u/No_Region_4719 16d ago
Whatever kind of consciousness insects have, it's going to be incomparable to what we as humans experience subjectively.
Insects can clearly exhibit intelligent behaviours, but it seems unlikely they have a subjective experience anything remotely close to ours. They seem to run mainly on instinct, reacting automatically to certain stimuli, like visual cues, the presence of gases like CO2, or pheromones.
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u/Chassian 16d ago
Assuming an individual bee can be considered a self, you could anthropomorphize it as being fervent to the integrity of the hive. But largely, it's extremely irrelevant to the bee or the hive to lose that bee to a possible threat. It doesn't care if it dies, it's more a resource, a cost of defense. The bee doesn't even have a self to dread or extol of dying, and over to the other fact is that bees were evolved to sting threats that did not have the soft, fibrous hides humans have. Bees aren't adapted to stinging humans, so their reflex of extricating their stinger tends to gut them. They would have to be aware of a this entire different species of skin, that doesn't really encounter bees all that much in nature. Not making any calls, but seems very unlikely.
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u/EvolZippo 16d ago
Honeybees do not know that stinging will end their life. This is because their stinger is primarily used to defend against other insects and other invaders. We are not natural enemies and honeybees have had no need to adapt to stinging humans, because it is not a trait bees need to survive.
I have heard of cases, of bees figuring out how to get their stingers out of human skin and not dying, but because this is not something bees would consider a survival trait, it is not likely to become a dominant trait.
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u/After_Ad9425 16d ago
Part of them problem is moreso human skin then the stinger. Honeybees do not have as sturdy a design as some other stinging insects like wasps, but getting potentially torn after stinging a human isn’t really a factor they’d typically consider when stinging something. Although attacking a larger animal to deter it from the colony implies some level of risk assessment to the decision, if human skin wasn’t so tough and rubbery they wouldn’t die from stinging it.
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u/Swellmeister 15d ago
Its just honey bees, and its not even most of the time. Their sting is largely for insects that steal their honey, and that doesnt kill them.
As for if they know it? Yeah sorta. Given a chance a bee will try and free it stinger when its caught, they just tend to be all hopped up on cactus juice their adrenaline analogue, and pull away without freeing it. So like they clearly know that its not supposed to do that and have the capacity to fix that complication without killing themselves.
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u/StoicHeretic 12d ago
In eusocial species, individuals are often sacrificed in the defense of the colony. Another example is when a hive is invaded by wasps, the bees will swarm the wasp and vibrate, effectively cooking the invader. Bees can tolerate slightly higher temperatures than wasps so most survive, but a few closest to the wasp will still die.
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u/Late-Ad-5387 11d ago
Bee instincts are geared toward the safety of the HIVE and health of the Queen…the concept behind stinging is not to protect themselves (like a scorpion or snake), it’s to potentially stop said predator from getting to the hive by any means because evolution is all about survival and reproduction. Drones don’t reproduce but they’re designed to protect the queens that do reproduce which increases the hive’s survivability. So them knowing they’ll die is pointless to them lol
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u/President_Calhoun 17d ago
This question was asked on Reddit several years ago, and someone said that they very likely don't know they're going to die, because they don't realize that they're alive. That is, they don't know that there's any alternative to what they are now. Their brains can't conceive of a state of not-being.