" the purported health benefits of being stung regularly"
When you get stung the chemical in bee venom that causes most of the problem is named melittin.  The immune system antibody that acts against small molecules and viruses is immunoglobulin G (IgG antibodies).  When you get exposed to some foreign chemical or virus your immune system randomly makes a few million uniquely different IgG antibodies and sorts out the one or two or three that are effective at fighting the problem.  That small number that is selected are then replicated millions of times and all that are not selected are degraded and disposed.  You can vaccinate yourself against melittin.  The typical vaccination and booster is to simply get stung.  This vaccination is extremely inefficient for several reasons and takes many, many boosters to get to an effective level of immunity.  One reason is your immune system for whatever reason fails to vigorously recognize melittin as a foreign chemical that does not belong in your body so mounts a rather weak response.  Another reason is for viral diseases you have anyplace from days to months after exposure before the first disease symptoms.  This long incubation time gives your immune system time to recognize the problem and activate any and all background immunities due to antibodies or T cells or other mechanisms and attack the foreign substance and wipe it out before you have symptoms.  This is why for a disease with a real long incubation time of months such as rabies you can vaccinate after exposure and control the disease 100%.  Or you can fail to vaccinate and kill the person with way over 99.9% odds.  For diseases with a short incubation time like the few day time you have with flu or covid your immune system does not always have time to get in gear before disease symptoms are already apparent even if you have robust immunity from several types of IgG antibodies and also killer T cells.  Now think about a bee sting.  You have an incubation time of maybe a tenth of a second.  If your body does not have pre-made IgG antibodies specific to melittin you will suffer.  It is perfectly normal for antibody counts to drop very low, very soon after an immunization or after recovery form a disease.  This happens with bee stings also.  So, you need to get a new jab real regularly or you will start to see more reaction to a new bee sting.  I know personally every spring the first sting I get results in some reaction.  It may even swell up a bit for a day.  After that first sting or two it hurts a bit for maybe 30 seconds then the hurt fades pretty fast and in ten minutes all that is left is a little red dot where the stinger immunized me.
So, is there any scientific evidence that getting immunized against one thing can help you fight off something else?  In the case in point is there any precedent for a bee sting being protective against some viral disease?  I can think of two very weak precedents.  Back in the 1960s the Russians did a lot of very nice work on immunity.  One of the experiments was to vaccinate people with the live polio vaccine once every three months for a few years and see if that had any impact on catching other diseases such as colds or flu.  What the experiments found was this protocol was as effective at preventing flu as getting the flu vaccine.  But, the duration of a positive effect was only about three months.  After three months from getting the live polio vaccine there no longer was any protective effect at all.  The conclusion was the polio vaccine kept your immune system in high gear and probably kept your T cell immune system in such a readiness state that your immune system was able to mount a defense much faster than normal resulting in a case of the flu with nearly no symptoms or perhaps no symptoms at all.  This result is in spite of the fact that you have little or no real immunity to the flu itself in the form of either antibodies or killer T cells specific to the flu.

The second precedent is the widely used immuno therapies against some cancers.  For instance the first line of attack against bladder cancer is to infuse the bovine tuberculosis bacteria into the bladder.  That bovine TB bacteria infects a lot of bladder cells and causes major inflamation.  Ask anyone who has had such therapy how many months it is painful and how long they have blood in their pee after treatment and it will be obvious that bacteria is really tearing things up.  If you think a little sore shoulder after a covid shot is tough you have no clue what tough is.  At any rate, what happens is some of the cancer cells get infected by that TB bacteria and if you are lucky that will cause your immune system to make killer T cells that attack the cancer cells and bingo your immune system kills the cancer.  The bovine TB bacteria is very poorly evolved to live in humans so does not cause infections that spread to the rest of the patients body unless the patient is terribly immuno suppressed.

In both these examples it is not antibodies that are important, it is killer T cells that are important.  Now, when you immunize yourself by getting a bunch of bee stings do you make any killer T cells?  I have not seen any evidence that you do.  From my understanding of how the various components of your immune system work I do not see any reason you would make killer T cells.  You get immune to a bee sting simply by having  enough IgG type antibodies specific to melittin.  That is all that is required for immunity.
A good question is why do we not have bottled antibodies against bee stings the medical folks could use?  After all, we do have bottled antibodies against snake venom.  Those antivenom antibodies are made by immunizing a horse against snake bite by exposing the horse to larger and larger amounts of snake venom until the concentration of IgG antibodies in that horse's blood is high enough to harvest.  The harvesting is pretty straightforward as we have been doing it since I was a kid.  Back then it was human blood and we were harvesting antibodies to treat polio.  The problem with making a horse immune to bee stings is the immune reaction is so weak against melittin the horse never builds up antibody levels high enough to be worth harvesting.  The same is true of humans it seems.  Our immune system is very slow to learn to recognize melittin which is why you need to immunize yourself so many times to get immune.  Even once you finally do get immune to bee stings the antibody level in your blood never gets very high.  Just high enough to give decent protection for most people and for some not even that good.  And even decent protection can be overwhelmed as happened to a friend of mine who got probably a couple of hundred bee stings one day.  He spent two days in the hospital.  

Dick

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