Can they lock on to a huge swarm of bees and beam them up and flood the ship with 'em? Or do the safety systems disarm the stingers before they remateralize? (Ok Paul I posted it, now pay up!)
I guess it all depends if the safety systems are online or not.( CAN NOT BELIVE I ANSWERD THIS QUESTION! )
The stingers are physical features; I don't imagine the transporter would monkey with the pattern that way, any more than it would remove the teeth and fingernails of a hostile humanoid being beamed in. Questions about venom aspects and stuff are harder to answer. Could you beam in a poisonous snake and have it devenomed in mid-transport? I feel like the answer is probably no, due to relatively tight time constraints while a subject is being transported, but such strange applications of known Trek tech are a possibility in the future of that universe.
Since the transporter has to scan and account for everything down to the sub-atomic level, any kind of physical manipulation is possible with a proactive and smart enough computer. That'll be five dollars.
Actually the question was whether or not I'd post a dumbass technobabble question or not. Which I did. Hey $5 is cheeseburger dinner and soda for me. WOOT!
I would imagine there are people at Starfleet Security whose sole purpose is to sit around and think of these kind of scenarios, then arrange with the people who program the transporters to do their bidding. Such a scenario would be if, for whatever reason, one were to need to beam up a live mugato, a pre-existing transporter subroutine may either beam out the venom in the gland, or may beam into the gland a venom nullifier. Granted, it probably wouldn't take away a lot of the lethality index in dealing with a pissed-off mugato, but at least the CMO wouldn't have to deal with the venom aspect as she's removing the redshirt's head from his rectum after the mugato shoved it up there.
It's probably for stuff like this that they actually have a transporter operator. It's only unexpected situations where the parameters have to be changed (swarm of bees, mugatos) that seem to really require a transporter operator. Although he or she might just be really adept at putting in the proper coordinates so as not to beam into a wall*, this seems more likely to be computerized than the executive decision "should bacterium x be put on the filter list, or is it a helpful species that allows the Alienites to digest their food?" *They make hay about this, but there's obviously some kind of pushing mechanism to the transporter that pushes matter out of the way at the assembly point. Otherwise everyone would've died in the first episode from nitrogen narcosis, if not spontaneously combusted.
I am thinking some kind of subspace force beam that comes down from the transporter emitter on the ship to the beam-in point (and subspace, because I don't see the ship punching microholes in whatever materials are line-of-sight between the ship and the beam-in point), then said beam widens out to some two-foot radius and creates a human-sized cylinder, then the transported matter is sent down via the subspace wave to be recomposited as human. Have we discussed in the BBS how this all works? As far as the swarm of bees thing works, that's actually an ingenious idea...if an intruder were wearing some kind of anti-tech or anti-transporter thingy, where they couldn't transport him into a holding cell or cargo bay, and couldn't errect shields around him (and now I'm remembering the Hirogen attack on Enterprise-E from the Destiny novels), they could beam up an insect swarm to occupy the intruder. The closest thing to a swarm of bees I've seen transporterd was from the TNG episode "Power Play", where they beamed up a big swarm of "lost souls" into a cargo bay.
For some reason I always assumed that's what the annular confinement beam was for - but I looked it up on Memory Alpha and aparently I was wrong. But such a component to the transporter beam *must* exist...I remember an early Enterprise episode where they triend to beam up a crewmember in a windstorm and he arrived with all sorts of leaves and debris incorporated into his body...later transporters would'nt do that, otherwise Checkov & Terrel would have arrived on Ceti-Apha 5 full of sand! (Not to mention everybody who attemped to travel via transporter dying of painful embolisms!) I always figured that tube of light you see in the TMP & Generations beaming effect was a visible version of that "shield"...
Would it even be feasible to beam up a swarm of bees? I mean, while they are physically small, each bee is a individual, complex, living creature. Every single one would have to be individually scanned, broken down, and its pattern stored (albeit briefly). Does the transporter have anywhere close to enough memory to beam dozens--maybe hundreds--of individual creatures up at the same time? Just because the creature is physically much tinier than a humanoid doesn't mean that the computer file that descibes it is proportionally smaller. (I may be overthinking this.)
I think an individual bee would be notably less complex and the computer processing required notably less intensive, but you're right to note that this might not mean you could beam a swarm of them up just because they'd physically fit into the space where a small number of transporter pads can grab a few 50th-percentile humanoids at a time. The mass isn't going to be the problem in the first place (hey, junky Klingon transporters beamed WHALES in), so there have to be other issues, and those would probably come into play beyond a certain number of bees. How many does it take before it's a swarm?
I dunno. I'm relatively convinced that they could replicate a bee if they really wanted to, it's just too power intensive for its purpose (you get: a bee). It's only a machine made of chitin and goop. Marvelously complex technologically, but nothing as complex as a human brain. At any rate, I think (TNG TM aside) that the transporter/replicator distinction is that the information used to recreate a human body, swarm of bees, humpback whale, test cylinder, Tom Riker or whatever is somehow encoded in the disassembled object itself. Theoretically, this could be done by an external computer, but if a transporter truly organizes matter at such a resolution that the precise position and velocity of individual atoms are known, the only physically possible storage method I can think of is at least the size of the body itself. Indeterminancy may dictate that such information can't be known without interfering with the particles, the transfer of information being a physical process that affects the position and/or velocity of the particles in question. At the same time, a quantum system appears fully capable of computing itself in a satisfactory manner, insofar as anything manages to exist from one moment to the next. Now here's a silly transporter question: why is the sensation of being transported not atrociously painful? The body is literally disintegrated by the transporter beam, and generally that sort of thing hurts. Do they beam out the central nervous system first and put it back in last?
Would someone really be able to feel it if they were such tiny bits being removed so rapidly and put back into place at the destination? I believe one would feel *something* all right, but no clue if it would approximate pain. The nervous system suggestion doesn't seem to be true, at least not for Starfleet transporters, so what are some other ways this could work without hurting someone?
If it's completely simultaneous (or simultaneous within about a tolerance of a millisecond), no, I figure they wouldn't feel anything or at least anything unpleasant. But it doesn't appear to be completely simultaneous, because subjects don't simply vanish and repappear, but become shimmery and transluscent for over a second. I suppose since the transporter puts particles where it wants, it could place the brain in such a situation that it cannot feel the death of the body, but it would still have to take out or manipulate whatever part feels first.
I used to think the transporter placed you into some form of stasis at first, but then I am remembering a TNG episode where Barclay is conscious during transport and is looking at something/someone/some alien during the transport process.