Like, if the player has no ranged weapon up to this point you could instruct the player to create a bow out of EoC's ore, so you can use this bow to hit a switch across some chasm.
I realized that this works with Queen Bee! She drops Bee Gun or The Bee's Knees (ranged weapon), Bee Keeper (releases homing bees after hit), Honey Comb (releases homing bees when damaged), Beenade (throwable, releases bees). If bees can activate switches, then you could just setup a room with a Slime Statue, a lot of buttons on walls and a door that opens if more than 75% buttons are hit more-or-less at the same time. Unfortunately, she sometimes drops Honeyd Googles which could give too much mobility.
Speaking of mobility... Biome Mimics could be considered to be mini-bosses as well. They could be manually summoned and often drop Grappling Hooks, so if you need some challenge in your map, you could just use them.
EDIT: I came up with more-or-less universal mechanism: healing potions. Imagine a passage of meteorite bricks X blocks long. If player walks through it, he will die after Y seconds, but if he drinks a healing potion in the middle, he will survive for another Z seconds. Because of Potion Sickness, one Bottled Honey is strictly better than any number of lesser healing potions in terms of maximum allowed movement.
So, if you have no potions at all (besides Water Bottles), then there's no way to proceed other than to kill BoC/EoC/EoW. If you have only Lesser Healing Potions, then there's no way to proceed without beating Queen Bee. Greater Healing Potions: WoF; Super Healing Potions: any HM boss, including Mimics.
This is very hard to implement (player needs to fight without potions; if player drinks potion by accident then she is screwed; you need to get rid of pots and other "illegal" alchemy sources; Crystal Hearts make calculations harder; you cannot force player to defeat more than one boss from single tier that way), but it should be doable.
Also, there's an insane roundabout way using the same mechanic: kill Eye, obtain Seeds, plant them in dirt, buy Powder from Dryad, purify grass, plant Daybloom Seeds in it. Use Daybloom to create Regeneration Potion: now you are able to survive this long burning coridor.
(EDIT 2: another useful potions containing Daybloom are Featherfall, Heartreach and Ironskin)