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Science

Do Honeybees Defy Dinosaur Extinction Theories? 521

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
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."
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Do Honeybees Defy Dinosaur Extinction Theories? More

Do Honeybees Defy Dinosaur Extinction Theories?

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  • Anyone else besides me? (Score:4, Funny)

    by tekiegreg ( 674773 ) * <tekieg1-slashdot@yahoo.com> on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:05PM (#10759844) Homepage Journal
    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*

  • Optimal temperature range (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:05PM (#10759847) Homepage
    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 [iclod.com] and win Half-Life 2
    • Do honeybees live in far northern climates? Say, in the Arctic? Because if they can hibernate for 6 months without a colony dying off, why not a year?

      • Re:Optimal temperature range (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @07:31PM (#10760879) Homepage
        Still, though... 65 Mya isn't that far from Sphecomyrma freyi (the "ur-ant" - the ancestor of both bees and ants). How can he possibly claim that this animal is going to be subject to the same sort of climatic restrictions that modern honeybees are?

        Heck, even many modern bees can take cold weather. This place lists 22 species of arctic bees:

        http://www.nhm.ac.uk/entomology/bombus/arctic.ht ml

        Are we supposed to believe with that long for evolutionary divergence, just because it "looks similar" to modern honeybees, that it had to have had the same sort of physiological characteristics? And are we supposed to make that assumption with such confidence that we just toss all of the evidence in the entire K-T layer for a meteor impact?

    • Re:Optimal temperature range (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Maybe they lived on honey for a few years. Perhaps they had really giant honeycombs where they lived in like a nuclear fallout shelter kind of way until the bad air went away.

      It was just a thought

    • Exactly (Score:5, Informative)

      by CedgeS ( 159076 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:15PM (#10759986) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • Re:Exactly (Score:3, Funny)

        by 3terrabyte ( 693824 )
        That was the first thought that came to my mind. I'm sure they had movies, like "Encino Bee", about cavebees unthawed into modern time. And much hilarity ensued.

      • But they weren't frozen (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Sensible Clod ( 771142 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @07:32PM (#10760887) Homepage
        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.

        • Re:But they weren't frozen (Score:4, Funny)

          by vsprintf ( 579676 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:11PM (#10762135)

          they're Still Here. That means there's something Wrong with the theory.

          And it's not hard to figure out. There was no asteroid impact. Dick Cheney wiped out the dinosaurs and started the rumors of asteroids of mass destruction for obvious oil-related reasons. It's a darned good thing for the bees that you can't run an SUV on honey. (Just kidding - it's post-election humor. :)

        • Honeybees were on the ark!

          [This is intended to be "funny" or "food for thought". It is not at all clear, to say the least, that the Flood and the Extinction were the same event - even if you believe in the Flood as I do.]

        • Re:But they weren't frozen (Score:4, Insightful)

          by juhaz ( 110830 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @04:14AM (#10763962) Homepage
          It's 6 degrees celsius outside as I'm writing this (that's 42.8 F for you weird Americans).

          There are no flowers outside. Nor any bees. It's way under the optimal, colder than after ka-blam, somewhat above freezing, though... By your reasoning, that should mean that when summer comes next year, bees have starved and died.

          But... they'll be here. They are, every spring. That means there's something Wrong, eh? Maybe I'm just hallucinating and actually living in tropics. Or maybe it's teh matrix. Or maybe the bees are just more hardy than the people writing this article think.

          Pick one, occam's razor will help.

    • Honey Bee Behavior (Score:5, Informative)

      by dunsel ( 559042 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:16PM (#10760011)
      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.

    • Re:Optimal temperature range (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The asteroid impact model is perhaps too simple, too. The anomaly of this Honeybee finding may indicate a need for improvement in the asteroid hypothesis.

      Namely, would the temperature truly drop globally after the collision of an asteroid? Or is there an anomalous spot on earth that the temperature remains habitable (via some fluid exchange of heat or thinning of obscuring dust cloud)?

      In short, don't just jump to conclusion because there are some anomalies in a model. After all, that is why it is called "

    • Re:Optimal temperature range (Score:5, Funny)

      by Aqua OS X ( 458522 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:21PM (#10760071)
      No, they were on Noah'a ark. End of story. ;)

    • Re:Optimal temperature range (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Bees are much smaller than me, but I imagine I'm much more adaptable and mobile.

    • Re:Optimal temperature range (Score:5, Informative)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:30PM (#10760200) Journal
      as I said in my other post, I've kept bees.

      They don't need to forage. They stockpile vast amounts of honey just in case there's no food next year. On the order of 100s of times more than they need to survive a winter. A large hive untouched could probably survive 30 or 40 years with no new food source.

      They've also been known to fly 20 miles from the hive to find a food source. It doesn't take much. If it's flowering, the bees will find it. Most of the bees got their nectar, where I was, from dandelions and other weeds, which don't have very strict climactic conditions to grow.

      I'm not shocked in the least to find that they survived and dinosaurs didnt.

  • ahem (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:05PM (#10759851)
    here in america, we pronounce it "nuculer", you insensitive clod.
    • "here in america, we pronounce it "nuculer" Jimmy Carter, who is the only president who was an actual nuclear engineer earlier in his career, pronounced it this way.

    • Re:ahem (Score:3, Funny)

      by back_pages ( 600753 )
      I heard an anecdote from some retired military officer (cannot possibly recall who) and he said, "Yeah, I know the difference. When I'm talking about power plants and research, I say nuclear. When I'm talking about weapons, I say nukuler. I figure, when you actually have nukuler weapons at your disposal, you can pronounce it however you damn well please."

      Can anybody put a name to that paraphrased quote?

  • Confusion... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pi_0's don't shower ( 741216 ) <ethan&isp,northwestern,edu> on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:07PM (#10759869) Homepage Journal
    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.

    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 /. is there's no shortage of people who'll try to explain this...)

    • Re:Confusion... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by darweidu ( 530107 )
      RTFA - tropical honeybees DON'T survive extended darkness. That's why it's odd. They aren't questioning the fact that ANY life survived, it's the fact that this fragile type of honeybees, specifically, survived.

      • Re:Confusion... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ebuck ( 585470 )
        Ummm... Total darkness isn't kind to birds, plants, or other animals or insects. The darkness may not have been 100%, mabye it's just a 20% dip in available light. That's enough to drastically change plant life (and everything else).

        We've let too many Hollywood producers "visualize" the meteor impact, I'm sure it was fantastic, but it's really hard to know exactly what happened such a long time ago. Surely it didn't flip cars like flapjacks on the streets of NY, and it definately didn't enflame the enti

    • Re:Confusion... (Score:5, Funny)

      by downward dog ( 634625 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:19PM (#10760056) Homepage

      From the article:

      Late Cretaceous tropical honeybees preserved in amber are almost identical to their modern relatives, she says. If no modern tropical honeybee could have survived years in the dark and cold without the flowering plants they lived off of, Kozisek reasoned, something must be amiss with the nuclear winter theory.

      The argument is not necessarily that the event directly killed honeybees (although the article also talks about honeybees' limited tolerance for cold temperatures). Basically, the idea is that flowering plants could not have survived through the event. Without flowering plants, bees would no longer have a purpose to their existence and would be plunged into a state of desperate ennui. No, wait, I mean they would starve. Yeah, starve.

  • Science schmience... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rackhamh ( 217889 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:08PM (#10759894)
    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.

  • Simple explanation (Score:5, Funny)

    by MoxCamel ( 20484 ) * on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:09PM (#10759899)
    Honey bees are do-bees. Dinosaurs are don't-bees.

  • hmm (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <`nomadicworld' `at' `gmail.com'> on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:09PM (#10759900) Homepage
    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 wonder if ants did the same to survive this nuclear winter.
    • IANAE (I am not an entomologist) but I was under the impression that bees eggs could be refrigerated to a very low temperature without killing them. It would only take a few eggs to survive the winter and then hatch when the conditions became more optimal for the species to survive.

    • Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)

      by The FooMiester ( 466716 ) <goimir AT endlesshills DOT org> on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:42PM (#10760337) Homepage Journal
      IAAB(I am a beekeeper)

      All bees that live north of the carolinas need to "winter over" as it's called. They don't really hibernate perse, because bees don't sleep at all.
      They form in a cluster, and actually shiver to keep warm. The queen stays at the center of the cluster, the rest of the bees rotate around. They make flights out to relieve themselves on nice days.

      In Northeastern Pennsylvania, it takes about 70 pounds of honey to survive an average winter. Average honey production is somewhere around 150 pounds. Winter is considered to last from the first week of November to the first blossoms of the year(usually red bud maple, sometime in March)

      I don't find it odd at all that the honeybee survived a year without sunshine, especially if in the warmer months it got above 40, so the bees could fly about to collect water.

  • I love bees (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:09PM (#10759903)
    I love bees. [slashdot.org]. Not only do they survive nuclear winter, but unlike cockroaches they wear cool rugby shirts. Sting on, my buzzy cousins! Sting on!

  • Of course species survived it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CedgeS ( 159076 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:10PM (#10759913) Homepage Journal
    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"?

  • Honeybees, huh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by demonbug ( 309515 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:11PM (#10759931) Journal
    Okay already, I'll go buy Halo 2...

    Uh, this is about Halo, right?

  • Not only that (Score:5, Funny)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:12PM (#10759932)
    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...
  • I can't say she makes a watertight case about honeybees - maybe the optimality temperatures isn't really that optimal, and queen bees can survive for a long time in hibernation. But I think the way
    this researcher is thinking.

  • Its pretty obvious then (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:12PM (#10759947)
    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.

  • Decimation?!?! (Score:4, Informative)

    by borcharc ( 56372 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:13PM (#10759963)
    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.

    • Re:Decimation?!?! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by great om ( 18682 )
      guess what: languages evolve and the exact meaning of words can change.

    • Re:Decimation?!?! (Score:5, Informative)

      by lightknight ( 213164 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:33PM (#10760232) Homepage
      One entry found for decimate.

      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 /"de-s&-'mA-sh&n/ noun

      See 3a.

    • Re:Decimation?!?! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:50PM (#10760437)
      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.

      Actually, they usually selected the most pedantic 10% of the group.


    • I get annoyed when this word is used incorrectly

      And I get annoyed by seeming pedants who themselves use malaprops. Do you really mean "crowdedness", as if they needed to eliminate every tenth man just so they could get more elbow room?

      Or maybe you meant "cowardice", which is more accurate historical motivation for the practice.

      Please, before you pick grammatical nits, make sure you know how to spell every word you use yourself. Otherwise you just look ridiculous.

  • Beescile. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:13PM (#10759966)
    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?

  • They don't really care (Score:5, Funny)

    by wombatmobile ( 623057 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:14PM (#10759969)

    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.

  • Different Mating Habits. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:14PM (#10759970)
    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.
    • "Bees Have one Queen per hive who..."

      That's just like the Borg!

      "Different Mating Habits"

      Too bad your message title won't ever appear in a Trekkie message board. If you don't ever mate, you won't have mating habits.

  • Freezer (Score:5, Funny)

    by spoonist ( 32012 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:17PM (#10760030) Journal

    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.

  • what??? no they aren't (Score:3, Funny)

    by mikethebends ( 829086 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:21PM (#10760072)
    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...
    • "Why can't we ever seem to live in peace with these noble, flightless birds? Sigh"

      Only when McDonald's finds a way to make mcnuggets out of them will we be able to work out a lasting, final peace with them.

  • Did you know? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:21PM (#10760081)
    Penguins have vestigial stingers.

    I think we know what happened to the bees.

  • Not again (Score:5, Funny)

    by JohnGrahamCumming ( 684871 ) * <slashdot@jgc.oERDOSrg minus math_god> on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:24PM (#10760118) Homepage Journal
    > despite what many researchers believe was a years-long period of darkness and frigid temperatures

    Please don't make me relive my teenage years...

  • I Love Bees (Score:5, Informative)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:27PM (#10760157) Journal
    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?

    • Re:I Love Bees (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:46PM (#10760394) Homepage Journal
      I'd think a bigger mystery is why crocodiles and sharks have survived virtually unchanged. What's a croc got that T-Rex didnt?

      A T-Rex is functionally warm-blooded. It may not be able to regulate its temperature, but between its mass and activity level, the core body temperature of a T-Rex will remain fairly constant. It's quite likely that the dinosaurs evolved to take advantage of this. Reduce the environmental temperature by a few degrees, though, and a T-Rex will need to increase its activity level to maintain body temperature. If there isn't enough food for the increased activity, it'll either starve to death or freeze to death.

      A croc is functionally cold-blooded. Global cooling just means it'll slow down for a while.

  • Amateur Theories... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pedrito ( 94783 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:43PM (#10760356)
    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.

    • Re:Amateur Theories... (Score:5, Informative)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @06:57PM (#10760513) Journal
      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.

      • A little more wood for the fire. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ebuck ( 585470 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @07:55PM (#10761091)
        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.

        http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2004AM/finalprogram/ab st ract_80171.htm

        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.

  • Self-centered scientists. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NaugaHunter ( 639364 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @07:04PM (#10760592)
    ... 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 [bumblebee.org]. 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.

  • As Winnie-the-Pooh once said... (Score:5, Funny)

    by sulli ( 195030 ) * on Monday November 08, 2004 @07:12PM (#10760660) Journal
    You can never tell with bees.

  • Honey Bees are pretty temerature resiliant (Score:3, Informative)

    by mgbaron ( 457884 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @07:14PM (#10760689) Homepage
    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?

  • Mystery solved. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Java Ape ( 528857 ) <<mike.briggs> <at> <360.net>> on Monday November 08, 2004 @07:44PM (#10760997) Homepage
    Based on what is known about the Cretaceous climate and modern tropical honeybees, Kozisek estimates that any post-impact winter event could not have dropped temperatures more than 4 to 13 degrees F (2-7C) without wiping out the bees. Current nuclear winter theories from the Chicxulub impact estimate drops of 13 to 22 degrees F (7-12C) - too cold for tropical honeybees. obviously, the temperature dropped by EXACTLY 13 F (7 C), the upper range of the bee's tolerance and the lower limit of current models. Where's the conflict? Do I win a nobel prize?

    • Re:Mystery solved. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Xeriar ( 456730 )
      What's worse is, if I recall correctly, temperature changes are now understood to affect the poles more than the equator (ie, the tropics).

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