![\"Photo](\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/honeybee.gif\" "\\"Honey")
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Recently I discovered that there are two different words for bee in Czech: \u010dmel\u00e1k<\/strong> [\u02c8\u02a7m\u025bla\u02d0k] (pl. \u010dmel\u00e1ci) for bumblebee and v\u010dela<\/strong> [\u02c8f\u02a7\u025bla] (pl. v\u010dely) for honey bee. While investigating these words I also discovered the wonderful Czech word hmyz<\/strong> [\u0266m\u026az] (insect), which sounds like it might be onomatopoeic. This got me wondering about the differences between bumblebees and honey bees and the origins of these words. <\/p>\n Honey bees (apis<\/em>) make and store honey, and live in large colonies in nests made from wax, while bumblebees (bombus<\/em>) are bigger and hairier; make only a little honey for their young, and make much smaller nests [source 1<\/a> & source 2<\/a>]. Honey bees are more likely to sting people than bumblebees, and lose their sting and die when they do so. Bumblebees are much less aggressive, very rarely sting people and don’t die when they sting [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n The word bee can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *b\u02b0ey-<\/em>, via the Old English b\u0113o<\/em> [source<\/a>], and the Czech word v\u010dela<\/em> probably comes from the same root, via the Proto-Slavic *b\u044c\u010dela<\/em> [source<\/a>]. The word \u010dmel\u00e1k<\/em> possibly comes from the same root as well, though I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of this.<\/p>\n Bumblebee was known humbul-be<\/em> in Middle English and this was changed to sound like the Middle English word bombeln<\/em> (to boom, buzz), which comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *kem<\/em> (to hum) [source<\/a>]. According to The Guardian<\/a> though, bumblebees were known as humblebees because they hum. The name bumblebee had been around for many years and started to become more popular at the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps popularised by the name of the character Babbitty Bumble in Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse<\/em> (1910).<\/p>\n Incidentally, a dialect word for bumblebee found in Hampshire, Cornwall and a number of other areas is dumbledore<\/strong> [source<\/a>]. Dumbledore combines dumble, a dialect word from Southwell in Nottinghamshire meaning “a wood lined stream often in a small, steep sided valley” [source<\/a>] and dore, of uncertain origin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I discovered that there are two different words for bee in Czech: \u010dmel\u00e1k [\u02c8\u02a7m\u025bla\u02d0k] (pl. \u010dmel\u00e1ci) for bumblebee and v\u010dela [\u02c8f\u02a7\u025bla] (pl. v\u010dely) for honey bee. While investigating these words I also discovered the wonderful Czech word hmyz [\u0266m\u026az] (insect), which sounds like it might be onomatopoeic. This got me wondering about the differences […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99,104,107,10,15,45,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-czech","category-english","category-etymology","category-language","category-latin","category-proto-indo-european","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Photo](\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/bumblebee.gif\" "\\"Bumblebee\\"")
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