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Why are honeybee stingers barbed?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Workers and queens are female.
A young female when given royal jelly triggers it becoming a queen and reproductive organs instead of a stinger.
The males are drones. They have male reproductive organs instead of stingers, and they just hang out and try to bone the queen.
But the worker bees are the ones that actually, you know, do the work.
So that's why European bees won't "swarm" someone and all sting them. You get a few warning shots and a chance to retreat, just moving away is enough for it to stop.
Meanwhile, African bees had to deal with shit like honey badgers. And as we're all aware, the honey badger gives very little fucks about anything.
So they don't half ass defense, they send out a shit ton of bees that won't stop until the threat is chased away and keeps running away. If they didn't the honey badger wouldnt even notice.
Then some genius decided to cross breed the species, and we get "Africanized killer bee" that treat everything they come across as a honey badger.
I wonder if that would sometimes be a desirable trait in farmed bees in areas with a lot of predators or competitors.
Like, the human knows that protection will be required and will suit up accordingly, but the ants, wasps or bears that try to rob the hive will be much less successful.
Yeah, I think that was the reasoning.
But they forgot that life finds a way and the hybrids wouldn't just stay where they put them.
They not only outcompete European hives, they'll straight up raid and destroy other hives stealing their young.
Because their African half evolved in a resource scarce environment. If they run across other bees they view it as a direct threat on their resources. Pretty sure it also causes them to establish new hives much further away than European bees. Which is why they keep spreading so fast.
I'm just glad no one's tried to crossbreed honey badgers with wolves to combat the hybrid bees yet.
That's okay, I know how to help the bees against the honey wolverines
Sounds like something that would be very disruptive to the local ecosystem. A beehive covers an incredibly large area for its honey making operation...