bēo

Old English bēo is the ancestor of modern bee, from Proto-Germanic *bijō. The ultimate origin may be Proto-Indo-European *bhi-, meaning 'to fear' or 'to quake' — suggesting that the bee was named for the fear its sting inspired. But this derivation is uncertain. What is certain is that bēo is one of the oldest words in the English language, and the insect it names has been central to human agriculture for at least 9,000 years. Rock paintings in the Cueva de la Araña near Valencia, Spain, dated to approximately 6000 BCE, show a human figure collecting honey from a wild hive.

The 'bee' in spelling bee, quilting bee, and husking bee is a different word entirely. It appears in American English by the mid-eighteenth century and probably derives from a dialect word meaning a gathering of neighbors for communal work — related to the Old English bēn (a prayer, a request). The two words converged in spelling but have no etymological connection. A spelling bee is a communal spelling gathering. The insect has nothing to do with it.

Honeybee colony collapse disorder, first documented in 2006, reduced managed honeybee populations in the United States by roughly 30 percent annually. The causes are multiple: varroa mites, neonicotinoid pesticides, habitat loss, and monoculture agriculture. Approximately one-third of all food crops depend on pollination by bees. The economic value of honeybee pollination in the United States alone exceeds $15 billion annually. The insect named for fear is now the subject of a different fear entirely — the fear of losing it.

The phrase 'the bee's knees,' meaning something excellent, dates to the 1920s and is pure nonsense. Bees do have knees — six of them — but there is nothing remarkable about them. The phrase belongs to a family of 1920s slang that combined animal parts with possessives: the cat's meow, the snake's hips, the flea's eyebrows. None of them mean anything. All of them survived.