bee mother

English

Alternative forms

• bee-mother, beemother

Etymology

From bee +‎ mother, possibly as a calque of Old English bēomōdor (“queen bee”).

Noun

bee mother (plural bee mothers)

1. (rare) A queen bee (perceived as the mother of the hive)
   • 1767, The complete Farmer:

     […] but how much more so when it must be acknowledged, that it is all owing to one female, and that this queen-bee, or bee-mother, alone, has given origin to such an immense progeny?

   • 1900, Allen Walton Gould, Mother Nature's Children, page 156:

     The youngest of the sisters—the one at the bottom—is only a tiny egg, which the bee-mother has laid in the cell.

   • 1903, Lilla Elizabeth Kelley, Three Hundred Things a Bright Girl Can Do, page 577:

     The bee family is divided into three sections, the "queens," or bee-mothers, the drones, or male bees, and the workers. The duty of the "queen," or bee-mother, is to keep the hive well supplied with workers.

   • 2019, Alison Benjamin, ‎Brian McCallum, The Good Bee:

     Astonishingly, bee mothers can decide whether the egg they lay will develop into a male or female.

   • 2024, Keith S. Delaplane, Honey Bee Social Evolution:

     Imagine a monogamous bee mother and her supersister daughters (figure 6.2) who are preferentially helping their mother rear more supersisters (r_help = 0.75): […]

   • 2024, Hetxw’ms Gyetxw Brett D. Huson, The Bee Mother:

     March is the time of Wihlaxs, Black Bear's Walking Moon. Nox Ap, the bee mother, awakens from her winter slumber along the realm of Xsan, the River of Mists. Nox Ap seems to appear from the great beyond as the bumblebee queen crawls out of her warm hiding space.