Honeybee or Honey Bee?

Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | Nomenclature, Taxonomy

In the preface of his 1956 classic Anatomy of the Honey Bee¹ the great American entomologist Robert E. Snodgrass explains the book’s title:

First, it must be explained why the name of the bee appears in the title as two words, though “honeybee” is the customary form in the literature of apiculture. Regardless of dictionaries, we have in entomology a rule for insect common names that can be followed. It says: If the insect is what its name implies, write the two words separately; otherwise run them together. Thus we have such names as house fly, blow fly, and robber fly contrasted with dragonfly, caddicefly, and butterfly, because the latter are not flies, just as an aphislion is not a lion and a silverfish is not a fish. The honey bee is an insect and is pre-eminently a bee; “honeybee” is equivalent to “Johnsmith.” [vii]

It is an interesting paragraph, full of common sense.

In myrmecology, we do write acacia ant, army ant, carpenter ant, fire ant, harvester ant, weaver ant, and wood ant. However, we also refer to non-formicids like Mutillidae wasps as velvet ants and Isoptera (=termites) as white ants.

I always feel a little queasy over conventions that seek to regulate the proper use of common names from a scientific standpoint; such names, after all, belong to the common, not to the self-absorbed scientist. Snodgrass’ grammatical rule presupposes that the person using a common name has a good grasp of the taxonomy of the group. The same feeling goes for the insistence by some anthropologically-inclined taxonomists that one should compile and list all the existing common names for a given taxonomic group while preparing a monograph, flora or fauna (if you ever worked in an area with a rich ethnographic diversity you know this would require a dissertation work in itself). If we as scientists wish to talk science or convince the public to do so, if we seek taxonomic correctness, we should then use and promote our system of scientific names designed specifically for this purpose.

In other words, go try to convince geneticists that, if they won’t call their beloved model organism vinegar fly, at least they should call it fruitfly. Wait, does this applies?

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