Do you know why that would be a positive evolutionary trait? Clearly, if they try to retract it, at some point in the history they must have been able to do so.
Because bee stingers are mostly used against other insects. They don’t get stuck in a chitin exoskeleton, only in the more flexible skin tissue of mammals. In insects the barbs instead pull out soft tissue from inside, thus making them more lethal (to the bees victim).
It makes it more dangerous : the sting is attach to the venom bag, so the venom bag gets to empty itself whole if it stays. Evolution would have chosen the survival of the hive, not the survival of the bee.
One thing is weird though : you can extract the sting of a wasp with a pincer. The wasp will live through it. Why do the bee dies when it loses it’s sting and not the wasp?
They have barbed stingers. Their stinger rips the bottom part of their abdomen off when they try to retract it. They don’t live through that.
Do you know why that would be a positive evolutionary trait? Clearly, if they try to retract it, at some point in the history they must have been able to do so.
The worker bees do not reproduce, so their survival after stinging is not that important.
Because bee stingers are mostly used against other insects. They don’t get stuck in a chitin exoskeleton, only in the more flexible skin tissue of mammals. In insects the barbs instead pull out soft tissue from inside, thus making them more lethal (to the bees victim).
It makes it more dangerous : the sting is attach to the venom bag, so the venom bag gets to empty itself whole if it stays. Evolution would have chosen the survival of the hive, not the survival of the bee.
One thing is weird though : you can extract the sting of a wasp with a pincer. The wasp will live through it. Why do the bee dies when it loses it’s sting and not the wasp?
Bee genetics are wild and helped develop a system where it doesn’t matter that the workers have tendencies to off themselves.