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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."
Read that as "from the asteroid impact at Chix Club?" For a second I thought a hot nightclub got wiped off the planet and my chances of procreating in this world went down a notch or something...*phew*
...in bed
This new finding is based on the optimal temperature range for honeybees and their food source - nectar-rich flowering plants (which share the same optimal temperature range), to survive.
However if your living environment has just been destroyed by a meteor, wouldn't these creatures just "make-do" with less-ideal conditions, maybe in a smaller population?
Honeybees are so much smaller than dinosaurs, I don't think we can really compare their adapting speed, ability and mobility.
--
Play iCLOD Virtual City Explorer and win Half-Life 2
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
here in america, we pronounce it "nuculer", you insensitive clod.
I thought it was pretty well-established that the dinosaurs were already in decline by the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago.
/. is there's no shortage of people who'll try to explain this...)
It's known that many species were already extinct by then, and there was a large asteroid impact around that time, causing some sort of a climate change that finished them off.
Based on the fact that many many smaller animals (rodents, birds, reptiles, amphibians) survived the event, I don't understand why it's confusing that insects (even tropical insects) survived as well. Can someone explain this, please?
(One of the great things about
The honeybees only survived because the aliens took them off the planet during the extinction, then brought them back about the time they built the pyramids.
Honey bees are do-bees. Dinosaurs are don't-bees.
Many species of bees hibernate during the winter. All you'd need is a few queens to survive in hibernation, and they could easily repopulate the bee world afterwards.
I love bees.. Not only do they survive nuclear winter, but unlike cockroaches they wear cool rugby shirts. Sting on, my buzzy cousins! Sting on!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It was a mass extinction, not a total extinction. If nothing had survived, we would have started over again 65 million years ago at a few species near ocean bottom vents. Many, many, many land plants and creatures survived. A much more interesting question would be, "How did Cretotrigona prisca or their close ancestors survive the mass extinction event about 65 million years ago"?
Okay already, I'll go buy Halo 2...
Uh, this is about Halo, right?
My favorite bees are the ones's from Margaret's Honey in Napa, CA. I bought a case of them last month and they keep transmitting me secret messages from space, I think. I tried to decode their message, and I think it's:
PURC HASEHA LOTWOFO RT HEXBO X
I think the language is Sumerian, possibly. No idea, help me out here.
I'll get to the bottom of this somehow...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
The bees at some point turned into swarms of ravenous dinosaur eating killers and wiped the poor innocent helpless dinos out. There can be no other explanation.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Decimation is the Roman Army practice of executing every tenth man in a unit to ensure discipline. This is usually done to deal with rebellion or crowdedness. I was unaware they every tenth dinosaur was executed. I get annoyed when this word is used incorrectly, I would use obliteration or some other word instead.
Last I checked you could pop a bee into the freezer for a few days and it will recover after you thaw it. Could this not explain how insects and other simple life forms survived the climet change caused by such an impact?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Do Honey Bees Defy Dinasour Extinction Theories?
Honey bees mostly don't care. Dinasour extinction theories are not getting a lot of buzz with them.
Bees Have one Queen per hive who is always well fed even if the other drones get killed off. But the Queen always gets priority so she can have more offspring. Dinos If they are like modern reptiles and mammals tend to live for themeless And they will try to allocate the recourses for them to survive even if it means not mating or letting a pregnant female starve, so the male could live an other day. These different methods have different advantages and flaws it is can be that the Bees lifestyle seems to have given them an advantage in times of food scarcity where the queen was still reproducing while the Reptiles were off fending for themselves.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This tells us more about what we don't know about honeybees than it tells us about the cataclysmic event of 65 million years ago. And its not much of a mystery anyway - many types of bees hibernate, and can be kept for years in a freezer for pollinating orchards.
It's hard to tell from your post - is it possible that you are actually a flower?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
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.
Obviously these so-called "scientists" have never caught bees in a jar then stuck them in the freezer.
Man are they pissed when they thaw.
Ice age. Big deal.
Dinosaurs aren't extinct...they terrorized an island back in 1993 or so, and a few years later made it to the mainland (San Diego, if memory serves.)
It was in all the papers.
Why can't we ever seem to live in peace with these noble, flightless birds? Sigh...
Penguins have vestigial stingers.
I think we know what happened to the bees.
> despite what many researchers believe was a years-long period of darkness and frigid temperatures
Please don't make me relive my teenage years...
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!!!!
Some crazy aussie in shorts wrestling them on TV, what? Crikey!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
of which this is one, but several people have posted things like, "bees can survive a winter," and "you can toss 'em in the freezer and they'll be okay in a few days."
The woman's an EXPERT in the field. You think she hasn't considered this? If you read the article, it discusses, specifically a range that this TROPICAL honey bee survives in. Tropical honey bees probably don't need to adapt to survive to very cold temperatures, as it DOESN'T TEND TO GET COLD IN THE TROPICS!!!! If you're comparing them to your common honey bee that lives in the U.S., Canada, or Europe, it's quite possible they've adapted to cold weather since it DOES GET COLD THERE.
Sorry, I don't mean to scream, but it's kind of like having a paleontologist try to tell you why your code isn't running? Thanks, but I don't need the help of a paleontologist.
Unless you have at least a hobbyist background in paleontology, you're probably not qualified to even speculate. I'm pretty sure I'm not qualified to question her findings.
Also, keep in mind, we're not talking about a winter that lasted a few months. We're talking about a winter that lasted a few THOUSAND years. It's a lot to ask of any creature to live outside of its normal survival temperature for a few months, let alone a few THOUSAND years. So, sticking a bee in your freezer for a few days is hardly a valid comparison.
... paleontology graduate student Jacqueline M. Kozisek ...
Did it occur to her to ask an entomologist? From Wikipedia In the autumn, young queens mate with male drone bees and hibernate over the winter in a warm area. Oftentimes, a queen will burrow into the ground to keep herself from freezing. In the spring, a queen awakens and finds a suitable place to create her hive, and then builds wax pots in which to lay her fertilized eggs from the previous winter. The eggs that hatch are female workers, and in time they populate the hive.
I am not an entomologist, but even I can postulate a) they are triggered out of hibernation by temperature, so they just stayed until the earth heated up. Winters around here (Western Penn) can spend quite some time around and below freezing, but the ground stays near freezing. All it would have taken would have been a relative hardy handful to survive; if they haven't changed much since then it's not like they were cross breeding like crazy. Heck, for all we know there were thousands of bee types beforehand and these are the only ones that could survive being frozen as queens.
It's almost as if this paleontologist didn't know queen bees hibernate, even for tropical bees. (See here. I will give her credit for an original approach, but even if I'm way off base (which I'll admit) it took me 2 minutes to find 'hibernate in winter' in reference to bumblebees. It may just be the article left out her accounting for this fact, but if she found out about it hopefully she can address whether or not they could have hibernated long enough.
Ok, I know I'm rambling so I'll make my point: while the temperatures were shown to kill off flying bees, I'm curious whether she was aware of the hibernation possibility and accounted for whether the temperatures were low enough, long enough to kill them as well.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
You can never tell with bees.
sulli
RTFJ.
This is what I know about Bees from a friend of mine who works on them in a laboratory. Bees are pretty resilient to temperature change. I one time asked him how he did his research and he told me that the "freeze" the Bees down to a certain point so that they can pick them up with tweezers and tag them and do whatever else Bee researchers do. The bees slow down enough eventually that they can be handled quite readily, but they don't actually die. Perhaps this adds more weight to the "winter" theory?
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
According to the theory of the Ka-BLAM event, temperatures didn't drop more than about 22 degrees. Do the math:
~91 degrees (optimal temp)
- 22 (max temp drop)
= 69 degrees. That's far above freezing, but far below what the bees--AND the flowers--need to survive. So, according to the theory, the flowers DIED for lack of sunlight, and the bees DIED from (to them) cold temperatures. Since they weren't frozen, chemical reactions did not stop; therefore, they starved to death because they couldn't keep (from TA) vital metabolic activities running. And since they weren't frozen, their carcasses should have Rotted Away. But...
they're Still Here. That means there's something Wrong with the theory.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Yes, and both of them had a 'southern bumpkin' accent. Carter was from the south, and Jr. was just dumb there.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Here's the link which presents the abstract to her thesis. Having read and written a few of these, it sounded good until the latent logical fallacies became obvious.
b st ract_80171.htm
http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2004AM/finalprogram/a
Note that she talks about optimum temperature range of the bees, and then contrasts that with projected estimates of ambient temperature drop. Then her projected temperature drop OVERLAPPS the previously projected temperature drop. Also she does not provide evidence that these bees cannot survive in a temperate climate, but again directs us back to it's optimum living range.
Finally, she never attempts to resolve the first leap of faith in her hypothesis. That modern day relatives are metabolically identical to thier ancient ancestors.
Maybe the actual presentation fills in these missing gaps, but I believe that if she had something really earthshaking to say, she would present just enough hints of her evidence in the abstract to make people's eyes pop.
Hey - has anyone thought of asking the bees whether the light stays on?
AT&ROFLMAO