"Bees' nest"?!!! WTF!!!

[Laurence Horn]

On Feb 15, 2012, at 10:26 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:

> On Feb 15, 2012, at 7:21 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 9:07 PM, Ronald Butters <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
>>> There are over 3,500,000 Google hits for "hornet's nest."
>>
>> Well, clearly, that licenses the use of "bees' nest" in place of the
>> obsolescent "beehive." I regret the error. But why would Colbert state
>> that a bees' nest harbors *yellowjackets*? In the Carolinas, is the
>> yellowjacket a variety of bee? In East Texas, the yellowjacket is a
>> very common kind of *wasp* that lives in what is termed, locally, a
>> "wasp('s) nest," whereas bees are said to live in structures still
>> archaically referred to, locally, as "beehives."
>
> I'll bee. I thought the yellow jacket to bee a be (and I'm pretty sure I've been stung by them at least once). And now I find out not only that it's a wasp, but that it doesn't have a space.
>
You'd know these details if you attended the right institution of higher learning.

--LH, U. of Rochester '65, whose home teams were the Yellowjackets and whose cappella groups were, and wore, Yellow Jackets.
(Yeah, it's tough when your mascot is an obnoxious stinging insect, but on the bright side our school color was dandelion yellow.)

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