Question at position 3 Evaluate the following statement: "the Western honey bee is very good at beekeeping".True since natural selection has sharpened their surviving skills over millions of yearsFalse and that species would have gone extinct if Humans had not started taking care of them a few thousand years ago

Question

Question at position 3 Evaluate the following statement: "the Western honey bee is very good at beekeeping".True since natural selection has sharpened their surviving skills over millions of yearsFalse and that species would have gone extinct if Humans had not started taking care of them a few thousand years ago

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Reframe the question in your own words: Evaluate the statement about the Western honey bee’s beekeeping ability. The two options are as follows:
Option 1: True since natural selection has sharpened their surviving skills over millions of years
Option 2: False and that species would have gone extinct if Humans had not started taking care of them a few thousand years ago

Option 1 analysis:
- This option attributes a general, evolved competency to bees based on natural selection over a long timescale. It suggests that bees possess refined survival-related behaviors (e.g., cooperative brood care, foraging efficiency, communication via dances) that could be interpreted as making them effective at “beekeeping” in the broad sense of thriving and maintaining colonies. In natural history, many traits arise because they improve fitness, so it is reasonable to say bees have been shaped by millions of years of selection.
- A subtle point: beekeeping is typically a human-managed practice, whereas the species’ success is driven by natural selection rather than human cultivation. The statement can be read as making a claim about the bees’ natural competencies that enable successful beekeeping by humans, which is aligned with the idea that their evolved traits support colony success.

Option 2 analysis:
- This asserts that without human intervention, the species would have gone extinct. While humans have impacted bee populations through habitat loss, pesticides, and disease, honey bees are widespread and have persisted for millions of years with natural ecological dynamics. The claim that they would have gone extinct specifically due to lack of human care over a few thousand years overstates humans’ role and ignores bees’ long-term persistence and ecological resilience. It also conflates human stewardship with the necessity of survival, which is not supported by the broad evolutionary history of the species.
- Additionally, stating extinction would have occurred due to mere absence of human care ignores other factors like natural predators, environmental changes, and the bees’ own ecological strategies (natal nesting, swarming, defense mechanisms, and colony organization).

To summarize the contrasts:
- Option 1 rests on a plausible interpretation that the bees’ long-term natural selection has produced robust survival traits that underlie their effective colony functioning, which is consistent with evolutionary theory.
- Option 2 relies on an exaggerated, anthropocentric claim about extinction risk due to humans’ short timespan of intervention, which oversimplifies and misrepresents the bees’ deep-time persistence and ecological dynamics.

In light of these points, Option 1 provides a coherent, evolution-based justification for the statement, whereas Option 2 introduces a misleading counterfactual about extinction risk tied to human caretaking.

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