New artifact Apiarist’s Veil, a cloth hat, perhaps an elven helm or fedora, that gives warning of all insects and pacifies nearby bees.

Eating royal jelly while polymorphed into a killer bee turns you into a queen bee.

Cut down on the list of inediate monsters by defining some of them to be either herbivorous or carnivorous (note that the game uses carnivorous to mean “can eat meat” rather than “only eats meat”).

Herbivores:

• Killer bee and queen bee
• All types of nymph

Carnivores:

• Salamanders
• Kops
• Imps, homunculi, tengu, and leprechaun

Attacking a queen bee immediately awakens and aggravates all killer bees on the level.

Eating too much royal jelly polymorphs you into a killer bee.

Giant spiders grudge killer bees.

Potion of honey; nonmagical but provides a lot more nutrition than juice. Can be obtained from bees somehow, possibly by dipping royal jelly into a potion of fruit juice or potion of water.

Killer bees occasionally drop lumps of royal jelly when killed.

Make killer bees’ evasiveness so high that a player should still be missing them a lot even in the late game. To compensate for this, reduce their HD to 1. However, area of effect attacks always tend to hit monsters regardless of evasiveness, so are still useful against them.

Applying a pruning hook (or possibly any polearm) to a space containing a tree, assuming there’s no monster occupying that space, it triggers the regular bees/fruit from the tree without needing to kick it.

Random killer bees always spawn female. Male ones can only generate in beehives.

Killer bees should hurt even more than they do currently, and their sting should poison 100% of the time, but they instantly die when they sting.

You can loot trees to get less fruit than you might by kicking it, but the chance of getting bees is much reduced. This might fail, in which case you might fall out of the tree and abuse Dexterity or something similar. If you are polymorphed into a Y, it has a 100% chance of success; if a human or elf, probably 80%; if an orc, 40-50%; if a gnome or a dwarf, 1-5%.