like what if the first person to coin the phrase, for the one bee that lays around just producing offspring, lived in a world that had no monarchies? or, were radically opposed to the concept.

also what do you think we would name them today if we just found them?

  • Hurculina Drubman@lemm.eeOP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    now I’m sitting here thinking about it, from one perspective, you could consider that particular bee to be a slave to the rest of the bees

    • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      7 months ago

      Bees don’t have a social hierarchy the way humans do. They aren’t queens or slaves, they are just different roles in the colony that contribute to survival and reproduction in different ways.

      • Hurculina Drubman@lemm.eeOP
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        that’s why it’s all about the human perspective. the first person to give it a name lived in a world of kings and queens, but if they’d lived in a world with no kings and queens but the world that had slaves, they might have called it the slave bee. there are infinite iterations, hence my question

  • Skua@kbin.earth
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    I feel like this is something other languages must have answers for, but I’m not finding any articles or discussions about it. Like in German it’s “Bienenkönigin”, which is literally the words for bee and queen, but surely that’s not the case for every language. The only other thing I can think of is just checking random languages one by one and that’s not something I want to do on mobile.

    Anyway I’d call them julia beesars

    • Hurculina Drubman@lemm.eeOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      7 months ago

      I tried googling “queen bee in Arabic” but I can’t tell if it’s giving me the Arabic term for queen bee or if it’s just translating the words lol

      • Skua@kbin.earth
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        7 months ago

        I find a good way to find the common name for something in another language is to go to its wikipedia page and see what the equivalent page in the other language is called. So in Arabic it’s “ملكة النحل”. The ملكة part does indeed mean queen

      • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        6 months ago

        Yes, or perhaps less literally “bee hunter”, it was used as euphemism for a bear. There’s some theories that saying the actual word for bear was taboo (some theories say that people believed saying it’s name could attract one), so they used euphemisms like that, or “the brown one”, bero, which is where the English word “bear” comes from.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    Whatever the equivalent word would be. Leader, chief, boss, it doesn’t really matter.

    As long as the concept of a single leader existed, it would have been applied to something like bees. Wouldn’t need monarchies to recognize a central focus of an insect group, and pick the closest word for that.

    You could maybe argue that there might be some alien species that had no concept of ever needing a decision maker, and they would have to coin a new word for the main reproductive entity of a hive. Something like mother might be used, if the aliens had that concept at all. Perhaps “generator” would be a close enough equivalent that the imaginary aliens would be almost certain to have a similar enough concept.

    But humans had a concept of needing someone to make decisions about things way back. So I don’t think it’s a realistic enough idea to say that in the absence of monarchy that we wouldn’t have some kind of term for a person in charge.

  • Buglefingers@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    Prime, Alpha, Leader, Lead, Breeder, Spawner, Source, Central, Keystone.

    Those prefixes used upon the suffix of: Bee. All seem like potential options

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    7 months ago

    “Matron” it’s a term you can use and is the head lady of a family, usually implying wisdom and a lot of influence.