Watching a youtube video by a beekeeper demonstrating that a bee stuck in his arm will gently wiggle itself around until it can pull free and fly away. Between that one guy with his live demonstration and his plentiful experience being stung by bees, and you with everything you've ever read, I'm obviously going to stick with him.

You should read better sources.

Here, an example of how bees behave after stinging meat: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7wH8dYiGbig

Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-C77ujnLZo

A bee that stings meat will pull itself out unharmed, if you let it.

Not at all my experience. My Italian bees are pretty hot though, so that may be why. My Russian bees are much nicer, and I've never been even stung by one of them, so maybe that's it. My hot bees will rip their stinger out within a second, and they emit a very particular frequency that I feel and that lets me know very quickly that I'm in trouble -- to be fair I've only experienced that vibration a handful of times because I've gotten much better at not leaving any exposed skin or any way for them to get in my suit.

All those bee rescue videos you see where the beekeeper doesn't wear a veil are not telling you the whole story. Before they go work on extracting the hive they'll first check that those bees are not hot and angry. If those bees are africanized then they'll use a suit and smoke and they will not bother making or posting a video about it. I.e., those videos are all cherry-picked experiences, all the good ones.

Does any of that support the idea that "a bee that has stung meat is no longer able to survive"?

This is clearly false. Why repeat it?

The ones that manage to leave the stinger in never survive in my case. Idk what to tell you. That's just my experience. Can they survive? Yes, they can. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? No, I don't think so.

Here is an example of a bee disemboweling itself:

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/u9YDf9w6Ps8

Here is another one:

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fMxZ4vKmOZo

So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written?

For example, this article interviews two bee scientists that confirm that the majority of honeybees die via self-disembowelment after stinging a human:

https://www.livescience.com/do-bees-die-after-stinging

However, they mention an interesting other thing, that may actually help explain what happens much better: bees don't die when they sting other insects or spiders, they only die when their needles get stuck in our thick skin. So perhaps the most likely explanation for the evolution and survival of the barbed stinger trait is that it's beneficial when bees fight their common enemies, and that bees simply don't interact that much with mammals and their thick skins.

I'm not sure why this answer is buried down so deep. It should be pretty obvious.

The average bee has no reason to ever fight a mammal. Optimizing for a rare event like that makes no sense. It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has become a frequent occurrence.

Surviving attacks against humans that help you survive is a really strange priority.

To be fair, many forest mammals will try to eat honey (bears and honey badgers being just two well known examples) and those have skins much thicker than even ours, so I suspect that bees have the same issues when stinging them. And those mammals are much more of a threat to a hive than insects and spiders, as they will virtually destroy the entire hive structure if they are not deterred, and likely kill thousands of larvae and bees.

> It's only once humans started domesticating honey bees that the interaction between honey bees and mammals has become a frequent occurrence.

This can't possibly be true; the honeyguides are a family of birds whose evolved behavior is to find humans and lead them to wild beehives so that the humans can forage the honey (and the honeyguide can forage the leftovers).

> So I've countered your two anecdotes with two anecdotes of my own. Can we go back to looking at what people studying bees have written?

No? You claimed that bees stinging meat cannot survive. Your anecdotes do nothing to support that. Decide what you want to say, then look for support. Where do you get the idea that two examples of something happening provide just as much support for the idea that it always happens as four examples of it not happening do for the idea that it doesn't always happen?

But for what it's worth, Aristotle wrote in the 4th century BC that bees stinging humans often recover, but that they will inevitably die if they lose their stinger.