Consider the honeybee bee

I have one more post to write in the pollen series, but I keep getting sidetracked by the photos people send me. Yesterday’s thermal images were awesome, but today’s photo is totally annoying. The photo below was taken at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum by beekeeper David Caylor. The text is on the wall of […] Read more

In(sect)flation and honey bees

This morning, NPR reported on a semi that wrecked near Island Park, Idaho. The truck, traveling from California to North Dakota, spilled 400 hives onto U.S. Highway 20. Local authorities are concerned that the “river of honey” oozing across the pavement will attract grizzly bears from the nearby forests. But the item that caught my […] Read more

Cell phones and bees: hang up and forage!

In graduate school I took a class from Gerardo Chin-Leo, a passionate and intelligent faculty member at The Evergreen State College. The class was about harmful algae blooms, but the first assignment was to find articles in the popular press and compare them to the scientific papers they were supposedly based on. OMG. It was […] Read more

Why Honey Bee is Two Words

Regardless of dictionaries, we have in entomology a rule for insect common names that can be followed. It says: If the insect is what the name implies, write the two words separately; otherwise run them together. Thus we have such names as house fly, blow fly, and robber fly contrasted with dragonfly, caddicefly, and butterfly, because the latter are not flies, just as an aphislion is not a lion and a silverfish is not a fish. The honey bee is an insect and is preeminently a bee; “honeybee” is equivalent to “Johnsmith.”

—From Anatomy of the Honey Bee by Robert E. Snodgrass

State Insects

The non-native European Honey Bee is the state insect of:

Arkansas
Georgia
Kansas
Louisiana
Maine
Mississippi
Missouri
Nebraska
New Jersey
North Carolina
Oklahoma
South Dakota
Tennessee
Utah
Vermont
West Virginia
Wisconsin

Not one native bee is a state insect. The closest relative of a North American native bee to make the list is the Tarantula Hawk Wasp, the state insect of New Mexico.

Update! Minnesota now has a state bee as well as a state insect. Bombus affinis, the Rusty-Patched Bumble Bee, has been so honored. Good work, Minnesota!