Honey bees are best known for one thing (hint, it's in their name, and it's not that they're bees.) The honey stores they accumulate represent an unprecedented quantity of stashed shelf-stable calories, and a lot of their behavior revolves around getting more of it and protecting what they've got.

Now, imagine you're an animal that accumulates all of this tasty treasure, and also happens to live in hollow trees. A bear could maybe climb up and kill your colony, but you've got a stinger to fight them off. Your other big threat is from nature - a forest fire could kill you and your whole colony in a flash. How might you evolve to survive such a threat? By engaging in specific behaviors every time you smell smoke. Running into the colony, filling your honey crop, and ignoring all other duties. That way you, your sisters, and your mother the queen all stand a chance of getting away from the fire if things really heat up, and you'll be able to use the honey you've gorged yourself on to build some more wax comb and start again. However, with a full honey crop you're probably not going to be able to contort your body to sting properly, and besides you've got other things to worry about. The only smell you're paying attention to is the smell of this smoke, and you ignore signals from your sisters about, say, a human invader in the hive. Your whole finely tuned colony defense system relies on odor signals, but that gets drowned out when you're only responding to the overwhelming smell of smoke. That's also why I always smoke a sting as soon as it happens: to avoid that one sting attracting a few more stingers from workers responding to the call to action.