Why Do Bees Die After Stinging?

have you ever been stung by a honey bee man it's the worst it burns for hours and then swells up leaving a big red welt for days but as bad as it feels it's actually the bee that gets the raw end of this deal because a few minutes after it stung you it dies wait why would an animal have a self-defense mechanism that's more deadly to it than the thing it's attacking that doesn't make sense well there's actually a lot more to this kamikaze defense mechanism than meets the eye so put on some thick gloves and get ice ready because we're about to take a pretty painful look into the secrets of bee stings sting you might not want to admit it but if you've ever been stung by a bee it was probably your fault sorry to be the bearer of bad news but in general bees only sting humans if we approach their hives or threaten them with aggressive or reckless behavior if a bee is hunting for pollen they'll leave us alone unless we handle them roughly or step on them now you may have heard that all bees die after stinging well actually only the honeybee does when any bee stings you it simply inserts its stinger into your skin in the case of honeybees however their stinger is made of two barbed landsets giving it rougher edges that can act as tiny hooks because of these land sets when a honeybee inserts its stinger into the skin it can't pull the stinger back out and that doesn't stop the honeybee from trying though the second they try to take off not only is their stinger pulled out but the muscles nerves and parts of their digestive system attached to it are torn out of their backside as well it's a nasty way to go if you ask me but there's an even more tragic element to it when honeybees sting insects as they often do when bugs try to attack the hive they can remove their stingers just fine it's all down to the amount of fiber in the animal's skin that causes the stinger to lodge those barbed land sets are designed to dig in as deep as possible and when it comes to a mammal's fibrous skin there's no removing that stinger without ripping it out so those poor honeybees have no idea that when they sting us the impact will kill them but back to us humans what impact does a bee sting really have on our skin well bee stings inject a venomous toxin called melatonin which gives the sting its painful effect and if you're allergic to bee stings it's actually it's melatonin that you're allergic to the toxin causes redness and swelling at the site of the attack and since bee venom dissolves in water it's able to spread around the human body with ease if you weren't aware sixty percent of the human body is water so there's a lot of spreading to be done now if you are ever stung by a honeybee you must remember to remove the stinger immediately alongside those muscles and nerves the pulsating sacs of melatonin the honeybee leaves behind will continue to pump venom into the skin until they're removed so you better pick them out as soon as possible the longer it's in there the more melatonin is injected and the itchier and more swollen the area will get as this poor guy found out when a bee stung his tongue ugh i'm reaching for the ice just thinking about it sounds painful but you know what literally can't hurt hitting those like and subscribe buttons down below all done great now we've seen how honeybees meet their fate but why do they decide to sting and how do they deal with butt-dwelling parasites like this well stick with me to find out stingless bees now to anyone terrified of bees what i'm about to say might sound like a joke a lot of bees are actually unable to sting that's right all male bees and many female bees from different bee families simply cannot sting in fact the andrenidae are an entire family of bees whose stingers are so drastically reduced they couldn't sting you if they wanted to there's also another group of bees called the meli ponini also known literally as stingless bees these tend to be found in subtropical regions like australia africa southeast asia and parts of brazil and mexico in fact most bees in central and south america are stingless so if you really really hate bee stings now you know where to head on vacation so without a usable stinger how do stingless bees defend themselves well like many other insects they bite instead however just like their stinging cousins these bees use their bite to cling onto their enemy to the death either theirs or the enemies so they're just as self-sacrificial as those bees with stingers on second thought i take back what i said about ideal vacation destinations nowhere is safe like regular bees stingless hives have been known to consist of anywhere between three thousand to eighty thousand workers that being said only a small number of stingless bee species produce enough honey to be farmed by humans but that doesn't mean we haven't found used for them because of their relatively harmless nature many people especially in brazil choose to keep stingless bees as pets so if you're looking for a pet but don't fancy any of the traditional options a stingless bee colony might be what you're looking for it won't require walking you wouldn't have to pick up its poop and you could get a little free honey at the end of it suddenly my dog is looking like a bit of a bum investment the stinging scheme bringing it back to bees that can sting have you ever wondered how a bee makes the decision to use it stinger well to answer that question we first have to understand pheromones a pheromone is a chemical or a mixture of chemicals released by an organism that affects the behavior of other members of the same species so it's information communicated mainly by an organism's sense of smell the idea that there are chemical messages floating around us all the time may sound a bit crazy but pheromone signaling like this is essential to a bee's survival for example a primer pheromone causes long-term changes in the physiology and behavior of a bee yep a chemical signal alone can literally alter a bee's body during development whoa but a releaser pheromone causes a rapid change in behavior so alarm pheromones which are a type of release or pheromones are emitted immediately after a bee stings something this alerts other bees to something like a threat entering the hive instructing all those that can sense the pheromone to attack the intruder but when do they know how to stop well a team of researchers from the universities of constance and innsbruck helped answer this question in 2021 they found that bees base their decisions about whether to sting or not almost solely on the amount of this alarm pheromone in the atmosphere in addition to this they learned bees hold two internal thresholds that measure the pheromone's level one that tells them when to begin stinging and one that tells them when to stop almost like an internal thermometer but for violence these pheromones can also help the bees determine the extent of the threat they face with more pheromones in the air indicating more danger as such the bees work out the level of danger via the level of alarm pheromone in the atmosphere so the more an intruder is stung the more bees come to fight it off considering a single colony can consist of more than one hundred thousand bees that's one fight you definitely don't want to be on the wrong side of killer bees back in 2019 it was estimated that your odds of kicking the bucket because of an allergic reaction to a bee sting was just one in 59 507 or 0. 00168 percent most of us can breathe easy except those are your odds if you're faced with regular honeybees your odds of surviving dramatically decrease if you're faced with the africanized bees of north and south america these are bees that were taken to brazil in 1956 by scientists attempting to develop a honeybee better suited to a tropical climate the african bees were placed in quarantine but 26 queens broke out the queens then began breeding with native brazilian bees resulting in a species of ultra-aggressive ultra-lethal mutant bees who have formed hives all across the americas now tell me that's not the best villain origin story you've ever heard these africanized bees are very defensive and will fight back with all guns blazing or more accurately all stingers stinging at even the smallest provocation i'm not joking this species have fatally injured more than 1 000 people with victims found with 10 times more stings than european bees not only that they've been known to chase people for up to a quarter of a mile now this scarily high death rate isn't because africanized bees have a more venomous sting than others it's that they attack in huge numbers with reports of swarms reaching a terrifying 800 000 bees i suppose the only question now is how many stings a person can withstand before the worst happens well the average person can tolerate around 10 stings for each pound of their body weight that means discounting an allergic reaction the average adult human can withstand roughly one thousand stings whereas a child can only tolerate up to five hundred so versus eight hundred thousand angry africanized bees less than point two percent of the swarm would be enough to end you well i don't know about you but i'm going to work on my ability to run a quarter of a mile fast [Music] wasps the difference now we couldn't do a video about bees nature's honey givers without mentioning wasps nature's apples unlike a bees wasp stingers aren't barbed meaning they can be used over and over without risk of the creature dying unfortunately but while their stings might feel the same wasp stings are actually made up of a completely different set of toxins one way to measure this is on the ph scale which ranks a substance from 0 to 14 depending on how acidic it is a zero on the ph scale is purely acidic like battery acid and a 14 is entirely alkaline like drain cleaner so as another example water is a 7 on the ph scale right in the middle because it is neither acidic nor alkaline and is therefore classed as neutral so where do b and wasp stings land on the ph scale well with a score of between 4. 5 and 5.

5 bee stings veer towards being slightly acidic well with a score of between 6. 8 and 6.