February 15, 2019

What is a Bee?

As spellers from across the country and worldwide collect to be a part of the annual Scripps nationwide Spelling Bee, let’s try to settle a basic question: Where does the bee in “spelling bee” come from?

bee hails from the Old English bēn indicating “a prayer, a favor.” By the belated eighteenth century, bee had become generally from the British dialect kind, been or bean, talking about the joining of next-door neighbors to work on a single activity to greatly help a neighbor in need of assistance: sewing bee, quilting bee, etc. This derivation counters a lengthy held belief that bee is the buzzing pest as well as the personal nature of a beehive. The earliest printed mention of spelling bee dates back to 1825. But kids had been engaged in competitive wordplay for years ahead of time. Frank Neuhauser won the very first Scripps nationwide Spelling Bee in 1925 by correctly spelling gladiolus. Another former championship words include:

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FAQ

Do worker bees kill drone bees for laziness? - Quora

Nah, they don't sting them to death just kick them out and don't let them back in. In early winter when bees go into winter mode they want to conserve as much energy and food as they can to make it through the winter. As the queen doesn't lay in the winter the drones have no usefulness so they kick them out into the cold. The hive is the organism and at that point those drones are only a drag.
The drones are bigger and make a much louder buzzing noise. When the ladies start kicking them out you can catch them and have a pet bee as they can't sting you.