Entomological Etymology 2: bees
I’m Taylor Hart, and this is Entomological Etymology! Today I’m talking about bees.
“Bee” is a Germanic word, tracing to Old English “beo.” Does that strangely remind you of high school English? It might, because it’s part of the name “Beowulf”. Beowulf might have literally meant “bee-wolf”: in other words, hunter of honey, a bear.1 Going even further back in time, you get Proto-Germanic “bion”, and then PIE “bhei”.
Like their cousins the ants, bees are taxonomically placed in the insect Order Hymenoptera.
That one sounds pretty weird, so let's break it down. “Hymen-” is a Greek root meaning “membrane”. That root shows up again in English to refer to a part of the female anatomy. But that's not what I’m here to talk about. The second root in hymenoptera, “-ptera”, is Greek for “wing”. This root shows up in lots of other English words, like pteranodon, (“toothless-wing”)3, and helicopter, (“spinning-wing”). So the Hymenoptera are the membranous winged insects, at least according to Carl Linnaeus. Although I'm not sure why he used that description for these insects, since lots of them have membranous wings, but are put in other Orders.
In the West, the European honeybee is the most famous bee species, and it has the scientific name Apis mellifera. Apis is from the Latin word for bee, and also gives us the word “apiary”,
Properly, hymenoptera includes not just the ants and the bees, but also the wasps and related insects called sawflies. Bees, like ants, are actually intermingled with wasps. Bees are part of a subgroup called the “apoidea”, which comes from Apis. Just like “humanoid” means something that’s human-shaped, Apoidea includes bees, along with some of their close relatives that look similar. The true bees are then a slightly more specific subgroup, called the “anthophila”: the flower-lovers. That's antho- like in a flower’s anther, and -phila like philanthropy, which is literally “love of humanity”. And its a pretty fitting name, since loving flowers (and eating pollen specifically) is kind of bee’s whole deal!
If you like honey, you probably have Apis mellifera to thank. These bees have been semi-domesticated over thousands of years: we give them housing in the form of artificial nests, and they make tons of extra honey that beekeepers collect. Plus they pollinate lots of crops. We covered Apis, which just means bee, but what's mellifera? This one also has Greek roots, comprised of “melli-” for honey, and “-ferra”, which means “to bear” (like in “ferry”). So Apis mellifera is the honey-bearing bee.
Honeybees get all the credit because of their close relationship with humans, but there are actually around 20,000 bee species. Don’t forget about the humble bumblebee. These guys actually used to be called “humblebees” before the “humble” drifted to “bumble”. Regardless, both names come from the humming or buzzing sound of their flight. And the scientific name for the bumblebee genus “Bombus”, for the same reason. Unlike the European honeybee, several bumblebee species are actually native to North America, and are important native pollinators. Bee nice to the bees! And then they probably won’t sting!
Sources:
Sweet, Henry. (1884) Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse The Clarendon Press, p. 202.
Harper, Douglas. “Bee” entry, Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/bee
Oxford Languages entry for “pteranodon”.
Moore, Ben. “Apis mellifera, Honey Bees.” Ben’s Bees. https://www.bensbees.com.au/apis-mellifera/#:~:text=The%20species%20name%2C%20mellifera%2C%20is,by%20the%20English%20word%20ferry.
Jones, Richard (2010). “How the Humblebee became the Bumblebee.” The Guardian. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/01/humblebee-bumblebee-darwin)
Brown, Lesley; Stevenson, Angus (2007). Shorter Oxford English dictionary on historical principles. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. p. 309. ISBN978-0-19-923325-0.
