[acyou]

Interesting thought. My thought is that it wouldn't necessarily take many generations to evolve this trait. A single generation of bees dying after stinging would have a huge advantage over such a hypothetical disease.

Wondering: 1. Do all bee species die after stinging? 2. Do bees always die? What's the mortality rate?

There may be plenty of diseases out there living off bees and other hosts, that are pervasive enough to provide sustained evolutionary pressure to facilitate this development.

We are not speculating on much here. Some others have mentioned the unit economics of losing single bees vs. Losing the whole hive are really excellent.