From a recent news item -

“Since October 2006, 35 per cent or more of the United States ' population of the Western honey bee ( Apis mellifera ) - billions of individual bees - simply flew from their hive homes and disappeared.”

Does this spring’s frightening, widespread and so far mysterious die-off of the honeybee vault the little pollinator into new admonitory status?

Is the honeybee this year’s canary in the mineshaft, warning us of a toxic incubus perching gently on humanity’s bedpost and gazing down upon our innocently sleeping forms with a soft smile, much as a fed eagle might perch upon a treetop, plump and content, its beak smelling pleasantly of field mice.

More than one third of the healthy natural foods humans eat, fruits and vegetables, depend on bees for pollination. Our honeybees' alarming disappearance bids us indulge an interval of concerned browsing and a few moments' buzz around bee words of the world, collecting some of the piquant stories about bee vocabulary. This is by no means a thorough etymology of the word bee, but rather a page scribbled in a word-nut’s notebook.

 

 

Our English word bee has many Germanic and Slavic cognates and relatives.

Old English béo

Old Norse bý

Modern German Biene

Dutch bij

Old Teutonic *bini

Lithuanian bite

Latvian bite

Russian pčela

Polish pszczola

Old Church Slavonic bŭčela

Irish bech

Welsh begegyr

 

Words for ‘bee’ and ‘honey’ of Indo-European origin occur in most Finno-Ugrian languages (e.g. Hungarian méh and méz), although some scholars (often Hungarian) suggest that Indo-European may have borrowed the me* roots from the Finno-Ugrian language family.

 

 Here is the word for bee in several other languages of the world.

 

Note that the Greeks named the honey bee melissa, after its honey (Greek meli). The Jews named the bee דבורה (pronounced in modern Hebrew de-vo-RAH) after its sting. Deborah is a common Hebrew feminine name. Deborah means ‘stinging bee.’ The Semitic root is dbr, one of whose reflexes is dabar, a Hebrew word for ‘word, sting, goad.’ Compare Arabic and Proto-Semitic dabar(a) ‘sting, ox goad.’

An interesting but utterly coincidental similarity exists in the Hebrew and Latin terms for ‘word.’ In Latin it’s verbum (the Latin root verb- ‘whip, lash, sting, cattle goad.’ In Biblical Hebrew, word is dabar from the triliteral verbal root dbr - ‘say, speak, prod, sting, goad.’

Hebrew scholars offer other possible Semitic origins of devorah,the modern Hebrew word for bee. They consider ancient cognates like the Aramaic for bee, debarta, and its Syriac cousin, deboritha, as well as the Hebrew word for honey, debash. There is another shoresh (three-letter word root) brought forth for consideration: the Mandaic Aramaic dibra 'back, tail, hence 'bee's stinger' (?) to be compared with the Arabic dubr 'backside, tail.'

 

Arty Bees Dare to Sting Cupid

Venus with Cupid Stealing Honey

Lucas Cranach, 1531 CE , oil on wood

Museo Galleria Borghese, Rome

 

Isle of Honey?

Is the Greek word for honey hidden in a well-known Mediterranean place name? The island of Malta, say some sources, was first Melita ‘land of honey’ (Greek meli, melitos ‘honey’). But the preponderance of linguistic and historical evidence suggests that the place name Malta is Phoenician, the Semitic language of the Mediterranean trading people who colonized the six little islands which comprise Malta very early in history. The Semitic triliteral root mtl carries the meaning of ‘take refuge’ or ‘hide.’ The Semitic verb form malata can mean ‘one takes refuge.’ Therefore it is quite likely that a later noun form ‘malta’ may mean ‘place of refuge’ or ‘isle of refuge.’ If you examine the sea map and observe Malta’s position south of Sicily, not too far from Tunisia, and think from the perspective of Phoenician traders sailing stout and yare vessels to and fro upon the Mediterranean, such an origin makes good sailing sense and good linguistic sense. 

 

Медведь

or Medved, a Honey of a Russian Name

 The common Russian surname Medved is an apotropaic circumlocution for ‘bear’ meaning literally ‘honey-eater.’ This is an old Slavonic periphrasis for bear. Med is Russian for honey, and the ved root means 'eat.' The ved and yed roots are related to eсть [yest'] (Russian ‘to eat’) and are cognate with other Indo-European verbs like Latin edere to eat’ (which gives us the adjective edible) and even with English to eat. Another Russian word containing this Slavic root is the interesting and racist Samoyed, the name of a people and a breed of dog. Samo-yed means 'self-eater' in Russian, a synonym for cannibal! The Samoyed people do not call themselves by that name. They possess their own proper ethnonym, and it does not mean ‘cannibal.’ Inuit is an ethnonym; Eskimo is not.

In order to keep bears away and/or to placate the spirit of the totemic animal of his ‘bear’ clan, the tribesman never uttered the name of the animal, for fear that if one spoke aloud the word bear, then the animal itself might appear to devour one. For the same reason, the word mother-in-law is seldom said aloud in North America. Among many peoples of the world the imposition of taboo on certain words is still a prevalent superstition.

How did one avoid saying the word ‘bear’ out loud? One made up other names for the animal, and one old Slavic circumlocution was honey-eater or medved. A almost similar type of periphrasis occurs in the monument poem of Old English, Beowulf. The hero Beowulf has a name that means ‘bee-wolf.’ That was a synonym, an Anglo-Saxon kenning for ‘bear.’ It was probably not because the word bear became taboo. Kenning was a feature common in Old English poetry. It added flavour and verbal brio and memorable word formation to the poetry, very much like the compound Homeric epithets of The Iliad and The Odyssey, for example Homer's reference to “the wine-dark sea” or to “rosy-fingered dawn.” Both are Homeric epithets. Such poetic figures are also mnemonic devices. All these long poems were recited by a bard. Standard epithets and kennings, all with proper metrics, allow the reciting bard some help and allow the audience the pleasure of recognizing familiar tropes.

Other examples from the poem Beowulf are kennings, or poetically phrased synonyns, for the word sea. Compounds that meant ‘sea’ include seġl-rād ‘sail-road’, swan-rād ‘swan-road’, bæþ-weġ ‘bath-way’ or hwæl-weġ ‘whale-way’ and hronrāde ‘whale-road’.

 

Curious & Meaningless Trivia

The Pig Latin for bee is eebay.

 

 

The Buzz on Bee Buzz Words

 

Afrikaans: zoem-zoem

Albanian: bzzz

Arabic ( Algeria ): bezzzz

Bengali: bhonbhon

Catalan: zzz

Croatian: zzzzzz

Danish: bzzz / summ summ

Dutch: bzzz

English: bzzzz

Esperanto: zum

Estonian: summ-summ

Finnish: bzzz

French: bzzzz

German: summ summ

Hebrew: bzzz (/zum zum zum)

Italian: zzzzzz

Japanese: bunbun

Korean: boong-boong (/wing-wing)

Norwegian: sum-sum

Polish: bzzzzz

Portuguese ( Brazil ): bzzzz

Russian: zhzhzh

Spanish ( Spain ): bzzz

Spanish ( Argentina ): bzzzz

Swedish: bzz bzz (/ surr surr)

Turkish vzzzz, vzz

Ukrainian: dzzz

 

St. Ambrose of Milan, Patron Saint of Beekeepers

Known as “the honey-tongued doctor,” Saint Ambrose is often painted in episcopal vestments wearing a mitre with crozier in hand, while nearby sits his most frequent iconic symbol, the beehive. One delightfully spurious explanation of Saint Ambrose’s connection with bees recounts how bees deposited the honey of theological knowledge on his lips while he slept in his cradle, thus explaining his later “natural” religious eloquence.

As usual with popular excuse-making, there is no suggestion that his eloquence was the outcome of many years of rhetorical practice and learning. Thus are the illiterate hoi polloi forever spared from the possibly upsetting insight that their profound ignorance is the direct result of their profound laziness and ploppish do-nothingism. “Like, why should I study when I can nab my welfare check and smoke some primo crack?”

 

 

Source of Apis, the Classical Latin Word for Bee

The word for bee in the Romance languages stems from Latin apis ‘bee.’ French abeille, Spanish abeja, Italian ape — all descend from Roman buzzers. So do words like apiary and apiculture. This little note concerns the ultimate source of apis. Some scholars suggest that the Latin root and even the Germanic words for bee like German Biene entered Indo-European languages from ancient Egyptian. One of the Egyptian hieroglyphic words for honeybee is bj-t. Here are a couple of technical jottings on that hypothesis from linguistic journal articles:

 

PE *ap- (?.): Latin apis "bee" < SH *`a[p/f]- "bee, fly" (in Egyptian, South Cushitic).</DT?”

 

Origin of folk saying “She is the bee’s knees”

(extract from the Guardian’s Notes and Queries site, article by Dave Todd)

“The expression was coined in the 1920s by an American cartoonist named Tad Dorgan, who also graced the language with such corny superlatives as “the cat’s pajamas” and less durable ones such as the “the flea’s eyebrows” and - a real clunker - “the canary’s tusks.” Dorgan also came up with: “Yes, we have no bananas.” I’ve long been puzzled why, to this day, the bee’s knees expression has maintained a certain currency in Britain, something it has not had for decades in the United States. The thought occurs that perhaps, more than half a century on, it’s a still lingering cultural artifact from the American occupation of the south of England in the lead-up to D-Day.”

 

Sundry Bee Words

Apitherapy is the pseudo-medical use of honeybee products. Almost none of the claims of apitherapy have been proved scientifically. Apitherapy includes the true beelievers who rub queen-bee “royal jelly” on their body parts while murmuring “Heal! Buzz! Buzz! Heal! ”

Cleptoparasitic Bees

(kleptes Greek ‘thief’ + parasite)

Internet note: “Cleptoparasitic bees, commonly called "cuckoo bees" because their behavior is similar to cuckoo birds, occur in several bee families. Females of these bees lack pollen collecting structures and do not construct their own nests. They typically enter the nests of pollen collecting species, and lay their eggs in cells provisioned by the host bee. When the cuckoo bee larva hatches, it consumes the host larva's pollen ball, and if the female cleptoparasite has not already done so, kills and eats the host larva. In a few cases, where the hosts are social species, the cleptoparasite remains in the host nest and lays many eggs, sometimes even killing the host queen and replacing her.”

Eusocial bees

“Bees may be solitary or may live in various types of communities. The most advanced of these are eusocial colonies found among the honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees. Sociality, of several different types, is believed to have evolved separately many times within the bees.”

Skep

Here’s a word brought into English by Viking invaders speaking Old Norse. Skeppa was a Viking word for basket or bushel. By 1100 CE, in early Middle English, skep meant a basket-shaped beehive made of rope or bound twigs or straw.

Here are two skeps, rustic beehives made of dried and bound grapevines.

 

After so belaboured a column, I’m sure some readers would like me to buzz off, and so I shall.

 

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