I started my world in a version before bees. I decided to explore to find some and bring them home which I did. Once I had done so I tried to breed them up to a sustainable number to roam around my home base before starting some farms. When doing so I noticed the bees were occasionally flying into the campfires below my starter hives and damaging themselves. Also when I placed my first hive created from honeycombs I quickly had to remove nearby sweet berry bushes because I caught bees emerging from the hive and promptly flying over to them and getting damaged. I thought maybe it was the proximity though the lostest were three or bour blocks away. I went around cleaning things up and finding/growing more flowers to feed my bees before I signed off for the day. Keep in mind that I thought I had 8 or 9 bees at this point though it had been a Minecraft day or two since I had counted them, I thought I was giving the babies time to grow up to help me make more. When I signed back on and went to feed the flowers I had gathered to my bees I was waiting for them to emerge from the nests/hive before I realized I could only find two widely separate of them!  I do not know what happened to all the ones that I had before, wether they failed to reload when I came back or if they all were damaged to death on various environmental  threats when I wasn’t looking.  I  do not think they should be that susceptible to non player threats.

unfortunately I lost my remaining bees to an unrelated problem and now need to start my bee search all over again.