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

[Victor Steinbok]

Wilson's second message is spot on. First, Colbert undoubtedly is
mocking the whole nomenclature, making it up as he goes along. I've
heard (and chastised) quite a number of people referring to a wasp as a
"bee". To some (mostly Americans), any insect with yellow-and-black or
yellow-and-red abdominal striping is a "bee". Furthermore,
"yellowjacket" is not a species. In fact, it's not even a single genus.
It incorporates several species that also qualify as "paper wasps" and a
few more species of similarly-colored hornets. There are other species
of wasps and hornets that exhibit different coloring, but I've never
heard anyone referring to them as a "bee". Several of my friends have
expressed puzzlement in the past when I pointed out that the insect they
were chasing around the house (or car, or picnic table) were in fact
wasps and not bees. One common response would be, "Aren't they all bees?"

There are several points of distinction between honeybees and
yellowjackets, including lack of body hair on the wasps, feeding habits
(wasps are generally carnivorous or omnivorous), lack of pollen
collection by wasps, the material used in construction of nests
(cellulose and other natural fibers bound with excreted "cement" vs.
wax), stinginess (females have stingers in both kinds of insects, but
wasps can sting repeatedly, whereas bees generally sting only once),
allergenic properties (bees are more likely to cause allergic reactions
because of their plant interactions, while wasps generally only hurt
because of the barbed stinger and an injection of formic acid).

The bottom line is that yellowjackets are no more bees than they are
ants, but folk taxonomy often classifies them as bees. (In fact, wasps
are closer to ants than to bees.)

     VS-)

On 2/15/2012 10:21 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."
>
> But my point was merely that only some kind of pointy-headed
> pseudo-intellectual would concern himself with trivialities like
> lexicon, syntax, phonology, etc., particularly in the face of language
> change, when all that truly matters is semantics. The point of
> language is communication, after all. As long as that end is realized,
> concern with anything other than that is of no more intrinsic interest
> or value to mankind than the computation of the ultimate - if there is
> one; as a Greek friend of mine likes to say, "It's mathematics to me"
> - value of pi.
>
> --
> -Wilson



On 2/15/2012 10:39 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> "Yellowjackets, often called 'bees,' as they are similar in size and
> appearance and both sting, are actually wasps."
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowjacket

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