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

[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!