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Why
are people allergic to bees?
Some
other animals are, too. There seems to be a disproportionate
frequency of allergy to stings. Why is that? We don't go into
shock over most things.
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For a beekeeper, the size difference makes the toxicity
trivial. But if you are a mouse, four to five stings could
kill you.
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We
don't have an answer, but here's something to think about:
could it be that selection has worked on venom to be allergenic?
This strategy could work well against intelligent social animals
such as monkeys and people. If one member of the family or
group gets stung and the others watch as that member has an
anaphylactic reaction and possibly dies, that would really
send a message!
Whether
this hyperallergenicity occurred by natural selection or a
weird coincidence we have no idea, but it's fun to think about.
How
are "killer bees" different from regular honeybees?
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Schmidt
theorizes that these bees evolved aggressive tendencies
to defend their hives from early honey-hunters in Africa.
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Killer bees evolved different behavior. They didn't have
to change their chemistry or change their morphology. They
don't use more venom. They are just really aggressive. We're
largely immune to the lethal potential of honeybee venom;
so, we're not worried about an odd bee sting. But killer bees
send 10 thousand to 15 thousand bees out. If you play with
these odds, you are not going to get out of there alive. It's
more or less a proportional relationship to the mouse's story.
Killer bees take the truth in advertising idea and square
it.
How are killer bees related to
our honeybees?
Ten of the eleven species of bees evolved in Asia. The other
one- ours- evolved in Africa, and it broke into races. Several
of the races broke out of Africa and into Europe- just as
human ancestors came out of Africa.
The bees who went north found that there were six to eight
months with no food and that it's pretty cold. So they evolved
to store more food in the form of honey and build better,
more permanent nests. These are the bees Europeans brought
here. But just like not all people left Africa, not all bees
did either.
Killer bees send 10 to 15 thousand bees out. If you
play with these odds, you are not going to get out of
there alive.
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People have a strong sweet tooth and people in Africa became
honey hunters, I'd say- and there's not solid evidence for
this- at least a million years ago. Long before fire, as people
started getting smarter and figured out more clever ways to
steal it, the two species began to co-evolve. It was an arms
race; as the honey hunters got smarter, the bees got nastier.
Then we got fire. With this new tool to intimidate bees, the
war really escalated and we got super-defensive bees.
When we brought these African bees to the New World, we had
a mixing of African and European bees and the progeny retained
more African traits. 
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Photos:
Justin O. Schmidt
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