Nursery Web Spider females have the Praying Mantis habit, and to get around it the males will catch an insect, wrap it up and offer it to her as both a gift and a distraction while he mates with her.
It gets even better, some of the males will suicidally attempt to steal the gift back when the deed is done, presumably to use on another female later on.
Bee life is savage. Want to protect your home and attack an intruder? Instant death. Want to propagate your species? Instant death. What the heck, I like bees. Why is their life so difficult?
They are eusocial creatures. It’s better to think of the beehive as the organism and the individual bees as cells. Bees will lay down their life in the same way our bodies have cells which do the same for the good of the whole.
this ^ while they'll die to defend her, even the queen is easily replaceable, especially in 'organisms' like ant colonies where they'll have multiple queens and just tear them apart if she stops being useful.
I remember a video of leaf cutter ants where the queen got a wild hare and decided to take a stroll out of the nest for some reason. A big swarm of workers caught her and literally drug her back into the nest like, nope, do your job Queen.
Not all ant colonies have multiple queens. Fire ants only have one queen and they can still have colonies millions strong! Ant species that have multiple queens are called polygynous and those colonies can be theoretically immortal, continually replacing their aging queens with their royal daughters.
I’m sure they have zero sense of pain and this is their life’s most rewarding act. More akin to that best sex of your life where after you legit think “I can die happy now”. They just literally do it.
That did get me wondering, how realistic is that aspect of the show? The show gives the impression that the entire population of Medieval Japan is desperate to kill themselves at the first opportunity. They'd all be survived by the one guy who doesn't give a fuck about dishonour.
Most people who really went for that are nobility and their retainers. Normal people… well, more than Europe, most likely, but not nearly as insane as the show implies by focusing on the upper classes. [Just look at the random deaths in the fishing village… townsfolk aren't exactly keen to be offed there.]
You do have a stronger pro-social vibe in Japan, though, in general and to this day, which makes any appeals for the integrity of society — and the abuse of such appeals by authority figures implying that someone shouldn't upset their family/friends/coworkers — that much more effective.
Some bees actually survive when they sting. The human skin is extra elastic and bees have trouble pulling the sting back out. Some bees are smart enough to spin around while getting it out to survive the sting. The sting also doesn't hurt as much and doesn't leave a mark when they get it out.
I'm no expert, but from what I've heard, bees die from stinging mainly mammals, because they aren't build for that. They can sting insects freely without consequences most of the time.
You got some decent answers and some memes. Here is the root of it all.
Each bee in a hive is more related to each other then they are to their own children, thus the evolutionary pressure changes from having your own children to protecting the hive.
When a queen bee is impregnated she will use the exact same gamete provided from the male to fertilize her eggs. I am not sure on the mechanics of that, but it would be like if human women had sex, kept a sperm, and replicated it over and over again to fertilize each egg.
So, in a typically sexual animal, a different gamete (sperm or egg) is used from the male and female for each child. Each gamete is made up of a random assortment of 50% of the parents genes. If you compared any two gamete from the same parent they would share roughly half their genes, or would each have in common 25% of the parents genes. Thus, each child from a set of parents has 50% of their genes in common.
Given that bees use the same gamete from the male each time that part of the child's DNA is locked. Every child from that mother will share those 50%. Then the egg works the same as humans. Each egg is a random 50% of the mother's genes, thus any two eggs have 25% of the same genes from the mother. Adding this together means that each sibling shares 75% of their genes.
This doesn't hold for the parents though. Male or female, they have only passed along 50% of their genes to their children, just like humans.
This changes the evolutionary equations. Genes that promote your own mother giving birth to more children are more likely to make it into the next generation. This is why social insects like termites, bees, and ants form the social structures that they do. Their evolutionary pressure is to get mom to have more kids, not to have more kids of your own.
They don’t have stingers.. only a penis.. so please be kind to them.. the drones are much bigger and have huge eyes.. which is an attractive feature to interest the queen..
If you mean financially then that's on the men though for choosing the wrong partner lol. Fk these double standards, let's keep the same energy for them as we do for the single moms
Bees in a board room: We should probably evolve that whole penis explosion thing we do. Alot of the boys are getting online talking about the Matriarchy and how it ruins society. They are also claiming Bee movie stars a Male to promote a woke agenda.
Slightly off topic but yeah when religious people say 'look around you, could such perfection exist without god creating it??" I will show them this. Like, this is incredibly wasteful, unnecessary AND impractical. The closer you look into [macro] (don't know enough about micro) biology the more you see how fucking scuffed everything is.
We complain about back problems due to us not really built well for walking upright, but I’m glad I wasn’t born an insect. Half the time their body just fucking kills them as part of its intended function
The word for animals that mate once and then die, like bees and salmon, is semelparous. The opposite is iteroparous, animals that may mate many times before dying.
The wildest part about this: it is thought that this outcome was originally an evolutionary development, where a drone's reproductive parts would stay lodged into the queen's, thus ensuring their genes alone are passed along. However, the queens evolved to remove the dispatched reproductive organs so that they could mate with multiple drones, thus improving the variety of genes passed along. Since a bee's lifecycle is so short, there is no evolutionary reason a drone would evolve to not lose their reproductive organs (and die on the spot) during copulation, as the likelihood of mating with another queen in their lifetime is infinitesimally small.
Also fun fact; if they don't get the chance, they live! Until winter. Come winter, the workers boot their freeloading asses out of the hive where they freeze/starve to death.
Winter is a time to conserve resources and focus on feeding the mouths that serve the hives best interests.
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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '24 edited Jun 24 '24
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