lpetrich

John R, where is this from? Human skin is NOT scaly! It is like frog skin and cow skin in that regard.

And I recall from long ago a picture of a bear's nose with lots of stingers stuck on it.

Grumpy

It makes sense that the shape of a queen's stinger would be influenced by natural selection. But how does selection act on non-reproducing workers? I suppose that, because the queen's survival is enhanced by any overall improvement in the efficiency of the hive, selection acts on the hive as an entire organism. Some hives might vary in the percentage of smooth vs. barbed stinging workers. Large hives with many barbed stingers flourish, while smooth stingers are enough for small hives.

This is probably a well-traveled area in apiology. The problem leaped out at me as I reread lpetrich's statement, and a solution occurred to me as I wrote. Thanks for indulging me.

lpetrich

There has been a lot of controversy about group selection; whether it happens, and whether it is a meaningful concept. Some, like Dawkins, take a reductionist view and effectively deny its occurrence.

Social-insect colonies may certainly seem like a good case of group selection. However, workers could simply be how a queen produces queens and drones.

There is an interesting suicide aspect to honeybee sex. Honeybee drones die soon after mating, in which they insert a spermatophore (sperm capsule; typical insect feature) into the queen.

This is to insure a good insertion; the inserted spermatophore will get in the way of other drones' mating attempts. This is an example of the "selfish gene" in action; a male that interferes with other males' mating makes it more likely that a female's offspring will also be his.

As to why a drone might die, that would actually be OK if he is unlikely to mate with another queen if he survives. So, like kamikaze workers, this may be another case of trade-off.

However, drones are generally not successful at being exclusive; queens may mate with as many as 20 drones, something which will give her sperm collection some genetic variety. I call it a "collection", because queens mate only during their "mating flights", which they do not long after emerging from their pupae, and never afterwards, storing sperm for the rest of their lives.

And just-emerged queens are as intolerant of competition as drones. They will sting un-emerged queens and get into fights with other emerged ones.

Here is <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=858821 6&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">an article on honeybee-venom optimization</a>. Of special interest is:

Queen venom loses potency after a year or so; this is consistent with only young queens doing any stinging.

Worker venom is twice as toxic to mice than queen venom. This suggests that venoms are optimized for their respective targets: queens for other queens, and workers for large predators.

-DM-

It needs to be kept in mind that the Kiosk includes two distinct sections: Feature articles and Agora articles. Agora articles are akin to letters to the Editor and they can be expected to be shallow as compared either to <a href="http://www.secweb.org/features.asp" target="_blank">Feature articles</a> or <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/index.shtml" target="_blank">Library articles</a>. Feature articles can be expected to be somewhat more shallow than Library articles.

The Cheng article was published in the Agora.

-Don-

[ September 30, 2002: Message edited by: Don Morgan ]</p>

-DM-

lpetrich--or anyone else--is free to write and submit an article, either a rebuttal to the Cheng piece or a new article on the same subject. See our <a href="http://www.infidels.org/infidels/submit.shtml" target="_blank">Submission Guidelines</a>.

The article as submitted by Cheng is not going to be revised unless he decides to revise it. Comments about the article are not going to be seen by the author unless submitted as <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=newtopic&f=63" target="_blank">feedback</a>.

-Don-