Where the Bee Sucks, There Sucks Pedantry

[Ronald Butters]

On Feb 16, 2012, at 4:14 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> 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.)

Nonsense. And tomatoes are fruits. And sharks are not fish. Etc. When the President Ordered the Bee to Be, he was not necessarily excluding hornets or yellowjackets or wasps.

"Ants" are little insects that live underground. They walk everywhere. They by and large don't fly up and sting you in the ass (you are more likely to get bitten on the foot, if at all). Some of them come into your house and try to eat your peanut butter.
"Bees" et al., however,  do not live underground; they live in "nests" and "hives." The fly, they don't much walk. "Bees" can all fly up and sting you on the ass or anywhere on your body (not too likely the foot). They do not come into your house with the express purpose of eating your peanut butter; they may be there to try to build a nest or hive or whatever.

Real people live in the lexicosemantic world of what Victor dismissively refers to as "folk taxonomy," and for good reason: there is no reason why an ordinary person would follow insects around and note the kind of material they use to build their "houses" before using their names in a sentence. I doubt that one person in a million has ever picked up a wasp and said, "oh, well, this couldn't be a bee, it doesn't have any body hair, whereas I am totally certain that a bee is not glabrous. And that probably means that a Mexican Hairless is not a dog, and maybe bald women are really guys."

Real people in ordinary conversations do not "classify" hornets as bees, but they do use the term "bee" as they hypernym for a class of insects that seem a lot alike, on the whole. (And if not "bee", what? Even if one looks in a respectable dictionary, one finds nothing much that would point one the direction of VS's scientific distinction. NOAD1 has

bee ...  n. 1 a honeybee. See illustration at HONEYBEE.
2 an insect of a large group to which the honeybee belongs,
including many solitary as well as social kinds.
See illustration at HONEYBEE.
•Superfamily Apoidea, order Hymenoptera: several families,
often now placed in the single family Apidae.)

And is what a bee has on its belly really "hair," or is that just "folk taxonomy"? Must I read the Wikipedia entry on "hair" before discussing what grows on a "bee"? Am I merely stupidly using "folk taxonomy" when I speak ofd the "belly" of a bee? 

Where, Victor, are you going to carry all those Swiftian cucumbers (and do you need to carry a gerkin, too?)?
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