Is it a myth that honeybees die they sting you? How come honeybees haven’t evolved to not die when they sting? Are there advantages to dying after stinging? Also what’s with bees and dying after woohoo?

1. Bee stingers

I’ve answered these questions more in-depth a while ago so here are some links to them: 

• How do honey bee stingers work?
• How come bees can sting only once?
• Why did they evolve like that?

But for a quick recap it’s because honey bee stingers are barbed compared to other bees and wasps. Honey bee can sting multiple times when it comes to other insects but in mammalian skin the barbs catch and they rip the internal organs from the bee killing it. They’ve evolved this way because their stingers have a ratchet mechanism that continues to pump more venom into an animal, which is why you want to try removing the stinger if you’ve been stung asap but by scraping it off using a flat surface like a credit card, if you pinch the stinger you’ll just squeeze the venom sack and push the rest of the venom into you anyways. 

The ripped out stingers also admin alarm pheromones so other worker bees will know to attack to defend the hive. It makes sense to evolve this way as worker bees can’t lay fertilised eggs so their fittness is low and worker bees outside of the hive are usually much older bees. Sacrificing these workers is worth it to protect the hive and queen. 

 2. Bee mating 

Here is a previous ask I’ve answered on honey bee mating 

• why do drone’s penises explode?

But another quick recap it’s because drones are very very expandable. They only thing they’ll ever do is mate with a virgin queen. They have no other role in the hive beyond that so it makes sense for them to die. A lot of male insects die once they mate. 

Here’s what a drones’ endophallus and tests look like. They die because of the force of their ejaculation in order to ensure their semen gets up into the queens’ oviduct. The force causes their genitals to explode. 

the bubonic plague is a good example of a bacterial disease that made insects (fleas) sick, got passed on to slightly bigger animals (rats, dogs, etc), which then passed it onto humans! it's totally possible and probably happens a lot!

The bacteria (Yersinia pestis) is actually harmless to the fleas and it didn’t make them sick it just made them regurgitate! It did this by forming a biofilm and a build up in the foregut of the flea so the blood couldn’t actually enter the stomach therefore causeing the flea to regurgitate any ingested blood, along with the bacteria into the host it had bitten (often rats). 

The black mass you see here is the bacterial build up all in the foregut of the flea. So it didn’t really make them physically ill and it didn’t harm them, it just sort of built up until they regurgitated it out.

Most people for obvious reasons associating regurgitation with being sick but this isn’t the case because regurgitation and vomitting are two different things. While vomiting in ejecting the contents of the stomach, regurgitation is rejection of the contents of the esophagus or a crop. 

Like in honey bees who regurgitate the nectar they collected from an organ called the honey crop.