Possibly the best thing...

[oloriel]

... about dawn_felagund having bees now is that her bee stories give me a chance to pick up the beekeeping vocabulary I'm lacking in English. You try looking up weiselrichtig in a dictionary and you'll see what I mean! Oh, I'm sure there are special agricultural dictionaries that'll have all the words in them, but I won't be getting an agricultural dictionary just for a hobby - not even the mad linguist will go that far!

(Besides, the mad linguist enjoys picking up words on her own. Looking shit up is ok if you have to read or write a text in a hurry, but trying to figure out what the word might be, and then checking if that word exists, is so much more fun. I blame German high school practice of only letting people work with monolingual dictionaries: eventually, you start enjoying it. Well, I did, anyway. Anyway...)

Of course, the mad linguist very often thinks in overly complicated ways. She has learned that English and German, despite their close relationship, function differently - so a direct translation is almost certainly wrong. Right?
Well, not always. Turns out that the English word for weiselrichtig is "queen-right". Weisel is an oldfashioned German word for "queen bee", and richtig is "right" (in the sense of "not wrong".) So - about the most obvious choice!
I'd never have figured that out on my own. I'd have circumscribed myself to death. *rolls eyes at self*

Comments

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Hehehe, I read down to "weiselrichtig" and tried to guess what that meant, and hooray, I guessed correctly! I didn't know the word Weisel, though; that's interesting to learn. (Queenright/queenless colonies with bumblebees act in quite different ways so they've always been something that's intrigued me.)

It ended up with me hitting Google for a translation as well, and I came across this (http://www.bee-info.com/knowledge/bee-glossary.html) page - seems to be a glossary of beekeeping terms with both German and English terminology. Too bad it doesn't seem to contain direct translations between the two, though!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I did not know the word "Weisel" before I got into beekeeping, either. It sounds archaic!
So how do bumblebee colonies act when they loose their queen?

We have a bumblebee colony nesting in a hole in our driveway wall this year! They seem to be very fond of our comfrey. I have probably annoyed anyone who mentioned the bumblebees in my hearing with the story of how an Anglo-Saxon medical recipe called (among other things, of course), for dorenan honny. *g*

Well, at least some cross-searching might help finding some helpful terms... so thank you for that link!

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Oh, for one thing the colony gets much more aggressive generally. Also, one or two workers develop ovaries and begin to act like mini-queens, laying eggs (which of course all develop into males) and bullying the other workers aggressively. They generally stop foraging entirely and let the other workers do all the work. The colony can continue like this for a few weeks, but of course no new workers can be laid once the queen is dead/removed, so sooner or later the workers get too old and then it just runs out of steam.

Dorenan honey? Is that the sugar syrup stored by bumblebees? *looks it up* So it is! Heh, I didn't even know the Anglo-Saxons had a name for it. How cool. You taught me something there.

It's awesome you have bumblebees in your driveway. They do love comfrey. Out of interest, what colour bumbles are they? Are they the kind of sandy-ginger coloured ones, or regular black and white striped ones, or black with bright orange tails? (I'm asking because the usual wall-nesters here are Bombus terrestris, the striped ones, but they have short tongues and so although they like comfrey, they exploit it by chewing holes in the base of the flowers and robbing the nectar that way!)

Is your comfrey still out then? It's very nearly over here, but we've had a VERY dry spring.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Much like honeybees, then?

It is! And we had a discussion in class about whether the "bumblebee's honey" was a magic ingredient or a medicinal ingredient. It could've been either - bumblebees might have been considered "special" or "more potent" or whatever than honeybees; but then their syrup might also contain different active ingredients. Which in turn would beg the question: Did the Anglo-Saxons know? - We did not come to a satisfying conclusion, but the discussion obviously stuck with me. There, now you had to listen to it, too! ^^

We have various kinds of bumblebees all over the garden - I've never seen so many at once as this year - but the ones we found nesting in the wall are black and yellow striped with a white butt, like this one (http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg143/lyra_japan/bergia/mai03.jpg). I would've thought they're Bombus terrestris, but they seem to be getting the nectar the usual way (and they also love our lupins) so they seem to have longer tongues... perhaps Bombus hortorum or ruderatum, I don't know! (But as you can see in the pic, some of the flowers have holes in them, too...)

It's mostly over by now - we've had an extremely dry and sunny spring, too.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Can't be sure from the angle, but I'd say that was Bombus hortorum, yes (looks like they have a second yellow band at the bottom of their thorax). That's really cool! I've never seen a hortorum nest!

Ooh, I suppose it could be a magical ingredient! Something that's valuable because it's rare and hard to get.

If I'm ever feeling a bit eccentric, maybe I'll write a grant to look at the components of dorenan honey and see if there's anything of note in there!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Well, I haven't exactly seen the nest, either - just the crack in the wall where they fly in and out. My mom-in-law managed to get stung by a bumblebee when she tore the concealing weeds away...

It could be - I think (at least in Germany) bumblebees also had very negative connotations so maybe it's a sort of "black magic" thing. But then it could as well be (perceived as) medicinal. Comfrey for instance was (and to some extent still is) a popular medicinal herb (its German name, Beinwell, is actually derived from bein in the sense of "bone" and well from wallen, an extinct word meaning "to get well"), so if them old Anglo-Saxons saw all them dumbledores harvest comfrey, pulmonaria and other herbs like that, they would probably assume that the healing powers of the herbs will also be found in the "dorenan honey". I mean, that's generally how these things worked - by observing things and interpreting them in some way.
This is why we didn't come to a conclusion in the end, because either option makes sense!
(And the truth probably lies somewhere in-between, anyway.)

So no-one has ever gone and checked what exactly "dorenan honey" is made up of?

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, and those are impressive robbing-holes in those flowers!