Page 45 - The Miracle of the Honeybee

Harun Yahya 43

The Self-Sacrifice of Worker Bees
In the period during which they serve as guards, these worker bees
place their own lives in danger. That is because any bee that attacks an ag-
gressor faces death because it is unable to retract its sting. Like the spines
of a hedgehog, the bee’s stinger is barbed that prevent it from being with-
drawn from the skin of many animals. The guard bees can retract their
stings only from other bees or certain other animals—and the guards suf-
fer no harm in such cases. However, if a bee stings a human being and
then seeks to fly away, the sting mechanism remains embedded in skin,
and the bee is thus eviscerated. The area of the abdomen which is thus de-
tached contains the venom sac and the nerves that control it. In the wake
of this damage to its internal organs, the bee soon dies.
Another feature of the sac torn from the soon-to-be dead bee is that it
still continues to pump venom out into its victim, even though it is no

longer attached to the bee. 27
The defense of the hive is a major responsibility that concerns the entire
colony—one that the guard bees fulfill even at the cost of their own lives.
Every bee in the hive behaves in the same way, and when the time comes,
it assumes the role of sentry, protecting the colony at the risk of its own
life.
This self-sacrificing behavior of bees refutes the evolutionists’ claim
that there is a “struggle for survival” in nature and that all living things
seek to protect only their own line of descent.

The True Reason for Bees’ Self-Sacrificial Behavior

Self-sacrifice is a form of behavior that cannot be explained by the the-
ory of evolution’s “struggle for survival” thesis. Evolutionist claims take
the position that living things fight to protect themselves and survive. But
the fact is that it is inaccurate to say that nature consists solely of warring
individuals, since living things display considerable behavior such as mu-
tual cooperation and self-sacrifice. In reply to that, some evolutionists
claim that living things sacrifice themselves to ensure the continuity of

Adnan Oktar