Bee Butts

Last weekend my little brother (seven years old) asked me a real stumper of a question. Why do bees die when they sting you? I thought I had the answer until he explained his query further. What is it about the bee anatomy that makes having an intact stinger essential to homeostasis? I’m paraphrasing of course. I couldn’t answer him until after a friend of mine explained it in class today. She is writing a paper on bee parasites, so I asked her to ask one of her bee keeping sources this pressing inquiry. She found out!

Apparently, bee stingers are attached to the muscles and viscera of their pelvises. This allows the stingers to continue flexing and digging into your flesh once they have stung you--even after the stinger has fallen away from the bee’s body. There’s no evolutionary reason to keep the bee alive after they sting you because they are protecting the hive. And, it makes no sense to have a bee equipped with an extra, metabolically-expensive set of stinging muscles that are needed only in an emergency. Thus, they “detach” and use the same muscles to sting you as they would otherwise need to carry on living. How freakin' cool is that?!

[Image from: http://www.hellkvist.org/photos/china.php]