Parlance of Beekeepers

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. And Grant, I’ve been reading up on a topic that has so much interesting language, I know you’re going to dig it.

Oh, yes, please.

Here’s some of the terms that I’ve encountered: cuddle death, piping, tooting, quacking, drone comet, and waggle dance.

This sounds like flatulence. You’re reading about flatulence in humans?

No, hippopotamuses?

No, dinosaur sex?

The sex part you’re getting close.

Oh, penguins.

Penguin sex? Why penguins?

I don’t know, cuddling. I just think about penguins cuddle in the cold. That’s all.

Okay, what was it? What are you reading about this time, Martha?

These are all terms involved with beekeeping.

Oh, of course.

I should have known the dance was the giveaway.

I should have remembered that from my Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes, really?

Yeah, he was known as a beekeeper.

Oh, really?

Okay.

I’m going to have to go back and read Sherlock Holmes then.

Well, it’s usually in the extended canon, the stuff written by other authors, not by Conan Doyle.

Okay.

I didn’t know that.

But I will have to check that out because I’ve been having the best time learning about beekeeping from a wonderful book called Queen Spotting. It’s by Hilary Kearney, and she’s a beekeeper herself. And the book is this great introduction to the amazing lives of bees, including this kind of language that I’m talking about.

For example, every hive has to have a queen bee, and she’s responsible for laying both fertilized and unfertilized eggs to perpetuate the colony. And if a hive has a queen, then the hive is said to be queenrite, queen R-I-G-H-T, which is a super cool word. But if the queen becomes sick or injured or otherwise unable to function, it’s time for her to be replaced. And this means it’s time for her to experience cuddle death.

And cuddle death occurs when worker bees cluster around her in a tight ball and use their collective body temperature to heat her until she dies.

Ooh.

Yeah, I mean, you can pick up a hot ball of bees, like about the size of a tennis ball, and you will feel the heat, and that’s called cuddle death, or also called bawling the queen.

Queen bees also make these distinctive sounds called piping, and there are two types of piping. One is called quacking, and the other is called tooting.

Again, you can go to YouTube and watch videos, as I’ve been doing, of queen bees tooting. And when they toot, you see all the worker bees, like, stop. Like, they’re like, what? What’s going on?

It’s just the hive comes to a stop.

It’s so cool.

They’re listening to find out what the queen wants.

Yes. What does the queen decree?

And I got some more here because I’m so excited about this. The worker bees are all female, and the less numerous ones are the males called drones. And a queen mates only when she’s flying through the air, and she’s followed by what they call a drone comet, which is a whole bunch of male bees, up to 100 male bees, chasing after her. And then they mate in midair.

And then we were talking before about the waggle dance. That’s when a foraging bee finds an especially good source of nectar and comes back to the hive and directs everybody to this source by doing this dance in a figure-eight pattern. And she’s waggling her butt during part of that pattern. And the waggle tells them the direction of the nectar and also how far away it is.

It’s just, it’s wild.

That sounds fantastic.

Oh, bees are, I think they should take over for the humans. It sounds like they have their act together.

Yeah, the way they communicate is just extraordinary. I mean, I originally looked into this because I was really curious about harvesting honey, but honey is the least of it. It’s so cool.

So I want to recommend this book called Queen Spotting by Hilary Kearney. And you can find out more at her website, which is called girlnextdoorhoney.com.

And I should add to Grant that the website and the book are gorgeous because she has a background in art, as it turns out. And the book is full of photographs, including all these fold-out photographs of bees in beehives, like close-ups. So you can practice spotting the queen in each hive because she’s a little bit different.

So it’s like, where’s Waldo but for bees?

Do you think I’m excited about this? Have I got you excited about this?

Oh, yes, absolutely. Your excitement is contagious.

Thank you very much for sharing the language and the book and the excitement.

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