Why honeybee stingers are a highly evolved weapon

This is a honeybee stinger that's about to, well, sting, and scientists captured it in action like never before. See, we've known the parts to a Western honeybee for hundreds of years, but a new experiment used high-speed cameras and a fake flesh to see precisely how well a stinger works. I have removed the stinger, have it on the forceps, and I'm about to put the little tip into the gel so that we can let it go and see it pumping into the gel itself. And as she lets go, you see the stinger and venom sac, that's that blob at the top, working deeper into this gel flesh. And what's driving all this motion is right there in the middle. Remember, at this point, the bee is gone. It's out of there. But how does the stinger keep working on its own? This other video shows it clearer. Those two blobs moving back and forth, they're valves that are actually dancing past each other to drive the stinger deeper into the skin, while also pumping in venom from the rounded sack a kind of double piston system. They're pumping in opposite directions opening and closing and all of these extra details that are brand new to science. If you get stung, the best thing is to try to take it off as quickly as possible because it will keep on going. But why does it do that? It's not to protect the female worker bee who dies after leaving that stinger behind. The western honeybee is considered a social species. It's kind of an insurance policy that the a life was lost for a good cause, which is defense of the larger colony. It's a clearer picture of a defense that took millions of years to evolve and that we've known the basic mechanics of even back in the 1900s. But we're also fascinated by honeybees because they've been a part of our existence for a very long time. And there are cave paintings that describe, you know, people actually like harvesting honey and wax from colonies. We've just had this long, incredible history with this species, and it is just a very special bee.