With all the flowers out in my part of the world I’m also seeing the bees visiting those flowers.

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As I sat at my desk today, twice within half an hour big fat bumble bees banged repeatedly into my office window.  They made such a sound I thought they must really have gotten a headache, if a bee can get a headache.

The word bee is about as simple a word as we can get in English.  This is often a characteristic of Anglo-Saxon words that have survived into modernity, being simple and short. Sure enough bee comes to us from Old English and thus from Germanic parentage.

The dictionaries aren’t certain but it appears that the Germanic name for these honey-giving insects arose from an Indo-European root meaning “quiver.” By extension the stinging little gals are named for their buzz.

One of the entries for bee at Urbandictionary calls them

“black and yellow cuddly furry little flying Teddy Bears.”

That’s quite an affectionate way to think about a bug that can and often does sting. Likely the author of this loving tribute was thinking not of honey-bees but bumble-bees.

As I said, several bees recently bumbled into my windowpane but looking at the etymology of their name I see that despite this seeming lack of coordination, bumble-bees are not named for their clumsy ways.

The Latin name for a bumble-bee is Bombus and this word doesn’t refer to their dive-bombing tendencies, but is a Latin word meaning “booming” or “buzzing.”

A look in the OED shows that the original appearance of bumble was from the pen of Geoffrey Chaucer and also meant “boom” and “buzz.”

So it seems that every way we look at it, it is the sound of these insects that gives them their name.