Why has a bee's sting evolved to be barbed?

Originally posted by divegeester
I'm going to post this in spirituality as the idea may be worth exploring there also.

Thoughts?

Too bad a male cat's penis doesn't fall off after intercourse, it is barbed also.

🙂

Originally posted by divegeester
No one said it was easy being a bee!

I'm not convinced we have identified why a sub-group of the bee family has evolved a barb on it's sting guys.

Why would the barb evolve? It serves no purpose we know of except to kill the bee in certain circumstances. Why not just evolve a sting without a barb like the wasp?

It takes time for the bee to pump all the poison in. The stinger needs to stay hooked into the flesh to get all the poison in. There are muscles that keep pumping the poison sac well after the stinger/poison sac complex is torn from the bee's body.

The bee needs the hive to pass on her genes, so will die to protect it. It's efficient for the whole colony which is the reproducing object, not so much the individual bees.

Originally posted by mlprior
Too bad a male cat's penis doesn't fall off after intercourse, it is barbed also.

🙂

'ribbed for pleasure' is not the same as barbed

Originally posted by amannion
Are you not reading the posts?
The barb acts as an early warning system. When a bird or mammal (eg. bear) approaches the hive, the worker bee that stings it, has its insides pulled out because of the barb. This alerts the other bees to the danger and they can defend or attack as required.
If there were no barb, then there would be no alert to danger.

Maybe if a wasp gets in a honey bees hive and slurps a few eggs and makes it out alive, when it gets to its own hive it is killed because its ID is messed up by the hanging gut of the honey bee.

Originally posted by divegeester
No one said it was easy being a bee!

I'm not convinced we have identified why a sub-group of the bee family has evolved a barb on it's sting guys.

Why would the barb evolve? It serves no purpose we know of except to kill the bee in certain circumstances. Why not just evolve a sting without a barb like the wasp?

The wiki reference previously posted describes why the barb may have evolved: it gives better penetration against other insects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_sting

Originally posted by joe beyser
Maybe if a wasp gets in a honey bees hive and slurps a few eggs and makes it out alive, when it gets to its own hive it is killed because its ID is messed up by the hanging gut of the honey bee.

What the?

Originally posted by amannion
What the?

That way he cant tell his buddies where the honey bee nest is.

Originally posted by joe beyser
That way he cant tell his buddies where the honey bee nest is.

Yeah but the bee's stinger doesn't pull out if it stings a wasp, only mammals (eg. bears) and birds. I guess wasps aren't really a threat in the same way - perhaps its the size.
One bear can do a whole lot more damage to a hive than a bunch of wasps.

Originally posted by amannion
Yeah but the bee's stinger doesn't pull out if it stings a wasp, only mammals (eg. bears) and birds. I guess wasps aren't really a threat in the same way - perhaps its the size.
One bear can do a whole lot more damage to a hive than a bunch of wasps.

Well in that case maybe they don't want the bears to tell their bear buddies where the bees nest is.🙂

Originally posted by joe beyser
Well in that case maybe they don't want the bears to tell their bear buddies where the bees nest is.🙂

My guess is they're not so worried about the bear's buddies, but the bear himself.

Originally posted by amannion
My guess is they're not so worried about the bear's buddies, but the bear himself.

If I was a bear I wouldn't want a bunch of bee butts stuck on my nose either.

Originally posted by divegeester
I'm going to post this in spirituality as the idea may be worth exploring there also.

Thoughts?

because god made them that way...

oh it's religious...oh well same thing.

Originally posted by divegeester
I'm going to post this in spirituality as the idea may be worth exploring there also.

Thoughts?

This is not a difficult question. Although it's common to talk like evolution proceeds principally at the level of individuals, that's really not the way it works. That turns out to be just a language of convenience. In reality, natural selection proceeds principally at the level of the replicator, the gene. (This is one thing I think Dawkins argues so well -- for instance in the Selfish Gene.)

If you think about this problem as though it is the individual that stands to "benefit" from some adaptation, then you might be left scratching your head (even if you take into account that the barbed stinger only gets stuck in a subset of victims). But, this just shows that the aforementioned language of convenience can, and does, fail sometimes; or it can even be misleading in certain cases if one doesn't remember that it's just a language of convenience. The barbed stinger is not difficult at all to explain in terms of the gene as principal unit of selection. (Prima facie, I guess it also wouldn't be hard to explain in terms of group selection or "good of the group" type talk, either, as a competing or even interrelated explanation.)

I have a hunch that the bee sting is a modifed hair. Unlike the wasp a bee is a pollen gatherer so it is advantageous to be hairy and I vaguely remember cutting one up in a biology exam and the hairs on the bee were also barbed and branched. The sting could therefore just be a modified hair and barbed like the rest of the bees hair.

Originally posted by deriver69
I have a hunch that the bee sting is a modifed hair. Unlike the wasp a bee is a pollen gatherer so it is advantageous to be hairy and I vaguely remember cutting one up in a biology exam and the hairs on the bee were also barbed and branched. The sting could therefore just be a modified hair and barbed like the rest of the bees hair.

Bees don't have "hair", but I know what you mean.

The stinger is a modified ovipositor - egg laying organ. The "hairs" are probably barbed to pick up pollen with.