I wake up with a shout, my chest hurting. I sit up to see my mother throwing a bee out of the window before saying “it died because it stung you”. This experience piqued my interest in biology, and I wondered what the survival advantages of this trait were. Later, I learnt how a bee's death, which seemed trivial on an individual level, was in reality a sacrifice to warn its hive through the release of pheromones. Reading beyond the A level syllabus, the book "A World Without Bees" taught me how pollination's industrialisation has reduced the western honeybee's genetic diversity, reducing the efficiency of hive thermoregulation. Having learnt this, I pursued the question of how this lack of genetic diversity brought