Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought bees in general, including the Rancher bees, weren't supposed to be able to infect the player. Am I wrong? I got hit by their bees a couple of times (maybe 2-3 times) and went from 0% infection up to 15% infection pretty ■■■■ed quickly.
Except they aren't. The rancher spawns animalInsectSwarm and the stumps spawn animalBeeSwarm. The animalInsectSwarm has a high chance of infecting you. The bees don't seem to have any.
Ranchers can definitely still infect you, but it’s not as bad as it was when they first got introduced. This change came in V2.3. They lessened the chances of getting infected from a Rancher swarm and completely removed the infection chance from a stump swarm.
Tree stump bees have been changed to a non-infecting version
Reworked buff weights for a lower chance of infection from Plague Spitter Insect Swarm