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Do Honeybees Defy Dinosaur Extinction Theories?
neutron_p writes "The humble tropical honeybee may challenge the idea that a post-asteroid impact "nuclear winter" was a big player in the decimation of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Somehow the tropical honeybee, Cretotrigona prisca, survived the end-Cretaceous extinction event, despite what many researchers believe was a years-long period of darkness and frigid temperatures caused by sunlight-blocking dust and smoke from the asteroid impact at Chicxulub."
I can see how a colony of honeybees could survuve a few years of absolute darkness. We all should know how they store a lot of honey, but they have many other behaviors that help them last through adverse conditions. Apart from the queen, any bee will give its life to protect the hive. No help stoping years of darkness here, though.
Bees eat more than nectar, they also eat polen and when both are scarce bees have been known to eat many, many other things to include other insects and assorted decaying plant matter.
Also, a colony of bees has an intellect that is much more than the sum of the bee minds it contains. Like ants, science isn't quite sure how the bees communicate (pheremones of some sorts) but the end effect is that they can guide many others to far away flowers, organize a defense of the hive, keep the hive core temperature habitable from 40 below (F) to 120+ (F), neglecting un-needed bees to death in times of drought, and a lot more.
So, I can see a large hive with a lot of stored food seeing the sun go away and not come back doing some things like killing/not feeding the majority of the hive, the surviviors eating what they can find, and the queen surviving years of hell to create a new colony when the conditions allow for it.
As a former hobbyist apiculturalist (ie; I had my own bee hive as a kid), I can comment a little here.
A beehive can survive for an extended period of time of bad weather. They survive pretty rough canadian winters, for one. A bee can be frozen solid and thaw out and still be alive.
Cool weather pisses bees off. That is, they get nasty and stingy when it starts to chill. This is to protect the hive from invaders. If an invader comes into the hive as it cools off, they'll ball around it, and sting it to death. I once opened a hive in the spring and found the remains of a raccoon who decided it would be a neat home.
The drones get kicked out about this time. They exist only to breed, and it's not worth the hives time to feed them over the winter. A couple weeks of extended cold, and you'll find a few dozen dead drones scattered about in front of the hive. They literally freeze to death on the doorstep like the little match girl.
As it gets colder, the workers "ball up" around the queen, insulating her and the caretakers closest to her. This is usually in the center of the lowest portion of the hive, because thats usually the warmest spot. They all then go into a sort of hibernation so they need little food or energy.
They make 100s of times more honey than they need, which is good for us. Harvesting all that honey doesn't hurt the hive during a normal season.
I don't know how many years this volcanic winter was supposed to have lasted, but I could easily see a big hive with a lot of honey surviving a decade of less-than-optimal weather.
They don't need to forage, like I said, they store a lot of food. Barring some asshole like me coming to steal all their honey, they could last decades. It just needs to get warm enough for the queen to carry on laying eggs and for the other activities of the hive to take place for about 2 months a year. "Warm enough" is only a few degrees above freezing.
This would be especially true if the hive is underground, which isn't completely uncommon in the wild for honeybees to take over an abandoned gopher hole.
In short, its really fucking hard to kill a beehive. They're designed to withstand a black bear smashing them apart and gobble down a bunch of honeycomb. I'd put my money on bees outliving a bunch of gigantic reptiles any day.
I'd think a bigger mystery is why crocodiles and sharks have survived virtually unchanged. What's a croc got that T-Rex didnt?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
as I said in my other post, I've kept bees.
They don't need to forage. They stockpile vast amounts of honey just in case there's no food next year. On the order of 100s of times more than they need to survive a winter. A large hive untouched could probably survive 30 or 40 years with no new food source.
They've also been known to fly 20 miles from the hive to find a food source. It doesn't take much. If it's flowering, the bees will find it. Most of the bees got their nectar, where I was, from dandelions and other weeds, which don't have very strict climactic conditions to grow.
I'm not shocked in the least to find that they survived and dinosaurs didnt.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
One entry found for decimate.
/"de-s&-'mA-sh&n/ noun
Main Entry: decimate
Pronunciation: 'de-s&-"mAt
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -mated; -mating
Etymology: Latin decimatus, past participle of decimare, from decimus tenth, from decem ten
1 : to select by lot and kill every tenth man of
2 : to exact a tax of 10 percent from
3 a : to reduce drastically especially in number b : to destroy a large part of
- decimation
See 3a.
I am John Hurt.
Oh my god a scientists said so so it must be true!
An expert in the field of apiculture? No. She knows fossils, not bees. She's a PhD palentologist. Oh wait, no she's not, she's a graduate student. We're talking about a graduate students thesis.
One that's based on the fact that amber-fossilized bees aesthetically look like modern bees, and are "probably" (the articles word) the ancestors of modern bees, so therefore they must have identical biological needs.
I've spent more years tending beehives than she did studying dinosaur bones. They really don't have "strict survival requirements" as she says in TFA. I've opened hives that should have been dead, but aren't.
The only things I know of that'll kill a hive is a disease called foulbrood, and a condition called a "laying worker", where the queen dies, and before a new queen is reared, one of the worker bees fills in and starts laying eggs. Since eggs are being layed, the workers wont worry about rearing a new queen. Since the worker is unfertilized, the eggs will all hatch male (drones), and thats no good. The only solution is to watch very closely for a bee thats going into cells backwards, and pinch it.
But I digress.
Also, we aren't talking about a winter that lasted a few thousand years, we're talking about a decade tops.
Some graduate student spouts some theory and you shout down anyone who dares criticize it. No wonder we're so overwhelmed with junk science these days.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!