There are many other bee species that can sting Humans and survive, but the European honeybee has a barbed stinger, so it cannot remove the stinger once it’s stung. In attempting to remove the stinger the bee will rupture its lower abdomen and then die.
Why? What is the evolutionary advantage to that?
I just wanted to add that the worker bees with stingers are dead ends in the lifecycle anyhow. Only the queen will lay eggs and only the drones (stingerless) can mate with her. (Unless the years have really screwed up my memory!)
Workers and queens are female.
A young female when given royal jelly triggers it becoming a queen and reproductive organs instead of a stinger.
The males are drones. They have male reproductive organs instead of stingers, and they just hang out and try to bone the queen.
But the worker bees are the ones that actually, you know, do the work.
So that’s why European bees won’t “swarm” someone and all sting them. You get a few warning shots and a chance to retreat, just moving away is enough for it to stop.
Meanwhile, African bees had to deal with shit like honey badgers. And as we’re all aware, the honey badger gives very little fucks about anything.
So they don’t half ass defense, they send out a shit ton of bees that won’t stop until the threat is chased away and keeps running away. If they didn’t the honey badger wouldnt even notice.
Then some genius decided to cross breed the species, and we get “Africanized killer bee” that treat everything they come across as a honey badger.