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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."
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.
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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.
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.
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?"
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.
Your chances of procreating went down a notch when you put "slashdot.org" into your browser.
> 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!!!!
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.
Actually, they usually selected the most pedantic 10% of the group.
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!!!!
You can never tell with bees.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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