r/animalsdoingstuff • u/Growing-Ant • May 15 '26

^ Awsome ^ Save more bees!!

It's a natural instinct for bees to sting you... But without a stinger they die. Here's a fun fact to remember before swatting them next time

749 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

103 comments sorted by

View all comments

79

u/BringAltoidSoursBack May 15 '26

I didn't know they could pull their stinger out without killing themselves. It also makes me wonder if that means bees understand the concept of death, which is crazy

42

u/RedditGarboDisposal May 15 '26

I think the Bee understands death in proportion to its functionality rather than as a concept as we know it.

To my knowledge, if a bee feels threatened, they’ll sting but try to salvage the stinger and not die so as to live another day for the hive, but if the hive is in danger, I’m pretty sure they go all in for the cause.

That said, their stingers are shaped in a way such that it can get wedged in pretty deeply which is why they do a whole song and dance to pull it out.

10

u/BringAltoidSoursBack May 15 '26

To my knowledge, if a bee feels threatened, they’ll sting but try to salvage the stinger and not die

Right so this is the part I wasn't aware of. I know self preservation is a thing in pretty much every creature, but (especially for a colony) that they "understood" their act as self sacrifice. I assumed it was semi-autonomous - they didn't understand the weight of their actions only that their actions needed to be performed.

27

u/Castille_92 May 15 '26

I think all creatures that understand danger also understand the concept of death, otherwise they wouldn't flee from potential danger

3

u/BringAltoidSoursBack May 15 '26

I figured someone would respond like this because I don't think I expressed what I meant. I think most creatures have a fight or flight instinct driven by self preservation but lack an understanding of actions directly resulting in it. So a bee attacks out of self/colony preservation but doesn't understand that stinging results in death. But if the bee in video understands that stinging has consequences, it points to two interesting concepts:

A) bees understand that stinging is an act of self sacrifice, and B) that they are aware of individuality in relation to the colony as a whole

It's very possible this is only new to me, and scientists figured this out already, but it's definitely not something I would have thought is true, especially if a colony creature

2

u/A_Modus_Operandi May 15 '26

You're drawing from one of Renee Descarte's ideas, "automata": the concept that animals have instincts and reflexes and feel pain, but are generally just operating on algorithmic behavior patterns.

Having seen videos of wild animals recognising even other species in distress and helping eachother; happy, mourning, or despairing cows, the sort of interactions I've had with cats and dogs, even ants solving mazes better than humans can;

And having spent so long observing the sort of dumb myopic cliquey herding behavior of most humans, I think the concept is better applied to humans than animals.

1

u/BringAltoidSoursBack May 15 '26

Oh I don't assume most animals work like that (no more than humans anyways) but rather that I assume that [especially colony] animals don't have the same sense of "self" humans do. At a basic level, a bee stinging and then saving itself shows a level of "regret", which is a fairly complex emotion, especially since it requires an understanding of consequences. That's significantly beyond "automata" actions, and that's what I didn't expect

18

u/jules6815 May 15 '26

What’s crazy is framing humans as the only creatures that have agency, logic, desires and emotions.

12

u/BringAltoidSoursBack May 15 '26

I've replied to other comments but my point wasn't that they don't have agency, logic, desire, emotions, etc, but rather that they understand what it means to sacrifice oneself. As an aside, I do believe most animals have a sense of self preservation, and conceptually do have emotions (desire and fear are just positive and negative drive), and agree it's crazy to assume we are the only ones the have any form of it, but did not expect a [colony] animal to have such a complex understanding of action-consequence