@LikeItOrLumpIt @SlatsGrobnik
A worker bee is any honey bee that stings. When worker bees sting, the stinger is barbed and stays in whatever they have stung and as a result, their abdomen ruptures to release the stinger. This is what kills them, but what makes me want to include this information here exactly?… Well, drone bees lack stingers. They have penises instead. A “beenis” if you will. The ejaculation of a drone bee is so forceful that you can hear an audible “bang” as his sperm is pushed into the queen’s sting chamber. The drone bee contracts his abdomen so hard that he may inflate his endophallus (the beenis) with this pressure. The drone bee becomes paralysed as he ejaculates and performs somersaults to the ground. Quite the spectacle and award-winning performance.
Life can be brutal sometimes, one day you are being looked after like a prince to enter a world of natural beauty waiting for the love of your life to procreate with you, next you are able to perform for all of 5 seconds and the force of the act of love is so strong it that it rips your beenis off (like the stinger of a worker bee) and you flip flop to the floor with a massive smile… and die. WOW.
https://quincehoneyfarm.co.uk/happy-fathers-day-unless-you-happen-to-be-a-male-bee/
Wasps have an incredibly interesting evolutionary history. The female wasps evolved an ovipositor which was used to lay eggs into plants. The ancestors of today’s wasps were thought to be plant-feeders, which shifted into parasitism. These parasitoids found an entirely new use for this machinery in host modification. In groups which shifted to a more provisioning/predatory lifestyle, the ovipositor became a multipurpose tool. In groups which shifted out of the parasitoid lifestyle, the ovipositor became more useful for defending the nest.
Because the ovipositor was used for egg laying, an activity males don’t take part in, it was only females which developed a stinger.
Male wasps are usually pretty defenseless, and most rely a lot on their resemblance to the dangerous females for protection. A handful have taken a couple pointers from the female wasp playbook and developed their own pointy defense mechanisms. However, they can’t inject venom because venom has been a bigger part of the female toolkit.
Even though this is a long post, it’s still kind of a short explanation. For example, there are complicated genetic reasons males don’t do a whole lot of colony work which includes colony defense. Overall, the most important reason male bees can’t sting is because the stinger and venom glands became fixed in the early body plan of female wasps and just never evolved in the male.
https://askentomologists.com/2015/09/23/why-cant-male-bees-or-wasps-sting/
Male bees 🐝 die after mating. That’s basically their lives, Honey Nut Cheerio
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