Sex, violence, death… It’s just an average day in bee world, says Bill Anderson

If a dying female honeybee could express herself in the moments after piercing a person’s skin with her internal barbed lancets, she might, if familiar with Corinthians 15:55, paraphrase it thusly: “No! Death! And where is my sting?” To which the unfortunate, and somewhat surprised, victim might respond: “Stuck in my skin!”

There is a charming notion that a bee is very reluctant to sting you because she knows she will die in the process, and death is routinely sub-optimal. Sadly, such anthropomorphic motivational projection is overgenerous. Her sting is primarily designed to be able to repeatedly sting other insects who defend their vulnerable abdomens with hard, impenetrable exoskeletal sections that protectively overlap like the flexible plates of medieval armour. The bee must insert her sting between overlapping sections, and the sharp barb on the end of her stinger is brilliant for prising them apart so she can deliver her venom into the soft tissue where it hurts, and then swiftly withdraw to sting elsewhere. Again and again.

But in soft, squidgy human skin, the barb cannot perform its function as a lever. Plunged deep into the epidermis to inject venom, it embeds like an anchor, and when the bee innocently flies off, perhaps to do some more stinging, she has no idea she’s just eviscerated herself, accidentally leaving the sting, a throbbing venom bladder and a chunk of her dying innards, hooked to a howling human.

Drones, the male honeybees, have no stings, and although this means that close encounters with humans are pain-free for both parties, they don’t completely escape the risk of lethal evisceration through intimate contact – and for a few “lucky” males there’s nothing accidental or unintentional about it.

Drones’ main function is to mate with virgin queens. “Drone Congregation Areas” are places in the sky where thousands of boys hang out waiting, hoping, for sex: virgin queens, reeking of alluring catch-me-if-you-can pheromones fly upwards through the buzzing congregation. An outstandingly fast and skilful drone will match the queen for speed and mate with her on the wing. Like a plane lowering its undercarriage, his howitzer of an endophallus emerges and he inserts it into the queen’s reproductive organs.

Evolution has left little to chance at this genetic exchange: the male orgasm is more than mind-blowing – it triggers an ejaculation that is so powerful, rapid and of such high pressure it literally explodes his internal reproductive tract inside out, tearing his abdomen open. This explosive eversion ensures his sperm is delivered deeply and powerfully into the queen, before ripping his endophallus from his body, leaving its tip lodged in her reproductive tract to stem sperm leakage as she flies on to her next sexual encounter with another lucky guy – while her former paramour falls to the ground, minus his manhood, dead. Ouch.

The female bee who died stinging a human was the unfortunate victim of a highly evolved, but over-specific tool: the barb on her sting. But from despatch to delivery, evolution has fine-tuned every aspect of the male bee’s reproductive contribution to ensure his offspring are successfully selected. He may not know it, but he’s lucky in love.

This article is from Idler #111.

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