Do bees know they'll die when they sting you

when a bee stings you once they'll quickly die. Do bees know this?

Probably not. That is because after they sting, they still have the instinct to try to get away. If they know they are going to die, they would not even bother trying to get away. For example there is a species of spider that allows its babies to eat the female alive after they hatch, and she does not try to escape, because she knows she is going to die and is willing to die. She "knows" because her normal survival instinct is inhibited when she is being attacked by her babies. There are also male insects (e.g. spiders and mantises) that will give up their lives to mate with a female. This appears not to be the case for worker bees, which try to escape after stinging. It is perversely the desire to survive that costs the bees their life. That is because their body is designed (by their genes) in such a way that the sting is strongly attached to the venom sac, and the sting is barbed, so that it will be stuck in the sting victim and cannot be dislodged easily, but the veomon sac is only loosely attached to the bee's body.

When the bee tries to get away after stinging, it pulls hard away from the sting victim to try to get away. Since the venom sac is loosely attached to the bee's abdomen, it is this weak link that breaks during the tug of war. When this weak point breaks, the venom sac is pulled out of its body along with the sting, leaving a hole in the abdomen, and the bee will die from this injury. If the sting were not loosely attached to the bee's body, then it would have been able to get away by just losing its sting even if it had a barbed sting. If its sting were not barbed, then it would have gotten away entirely unharmed, like a hornet or a bumble bee would. But it is the whole design of the honey bee worker's sting and the way the venom sac is attached to the body that conspire with the bee's survival instinct to cause the bee to die after stinging.