Do bees know that stinging you means death? And why do bees die when they sting you? Buzzz!?

Question

Do bees know that stinging you means death? And why do bees die when they sting you? Buzzz!?

Answer 1

They almost certainly can’t foresee that if they sting you they’ll die, both because they’re not that smart and because they can sting other things, such as insects, without dying.

The reason why worker bees don’t evolve an unbarbed stinger, or an instinct to be more careful when stinging mammals, is that each worker is more closely related to her sister workers than she would be to her own children.  So as long as the hive and queen remain, the worker who sacrifices her life defending them will have many more related descendants than if she’d tried to produce her own young instead.  That reasoning doesn’t apply to the queen, which is why her stinger isn’t barbed.  Wasps stingers are only slightly barbed, so they can remove them from the skin of mammals.  Possibly the difference results from the bee’s need for a greater deterrent to keep mammals from taking their honey.  Possibly the difference is because, in at least some species of wasp, a worker can become a queen if the original queen dies.

Answer 2

No they don't know this. They instinctively protect their hive but cannot have any prior knowledge about death because their brains are reduced to a mere ganglion.

Answer 3

they prob dont realize they die, and they die because their guts are connected to the stinger, and so they die after you pull it off, and the guts are left hanging on ur skin with the stinger

Answer 4

Bees don't make a conscious choice whether to sting or not - they are effectively "programmed" with instructions about when to sting.

They (usually) die after stinging because their stinger is barbed, so it stays inside the animal they've stung, and pulling themselves free disembowels them. however, the stinger remains in the target, and keeps pumping venom into it; a detached stinger also releases a pheromone, which attracts other bees from the hive and makes them sting you too.

Answer 5

Maybe. But they do it in order to protect the hive. What's one life in comparison to a whole hive?

And they die because their guts are attached to the stinger.