bee mother
bee mother noun: a queen bee (perceived as the mother of the hive).
Noun
bee mother (plural bee mothers)
- A queen bee (perceived as the mother of the hive)
- […] but how much more so when it must be acknowledged, that it is all owing to one female, and that this queen-bee, or bee-mother, alone, has given origin to such an immense progeny?1767, The complete Farmer
- The youngest of the sisters—the one at the bottom—is only a tiny egg, which the bee-mother has laid in the cell.1900, Allen Walton Gould, Mother Nature's Children, page 156
Examples of bee mother in a sentence
- Astonishingly, bee mothers can decide whether the egg they lay will develop into a male or female.2019, Alison Benjamin, Brian McCallum, The Good Bee:
- Imagine a monogamous bee mother and her supersister daughters (figure 6.2) who are preferentially helping their mother rear more supersisters (rₕₑₗₚ = 0.75): […]2024, Keith S. Delaplane, Honey Bee Social Evolution:
- Nox Ap, the bee mother, awakens from her winter slumber along the realm of Xsan, the River of Mists.2024, Hetxw’ms Gyetxw Brett D. Huson, The Bee Mother:
Forms of bee mother
| plural | bee mothers |
|---|---|
| alternative form | bee-mother |
| alternative form | beemother |
Origin of bee mother
From bee + mother, possibly as a calque of Old English bēomōdor (“queen bee”).
Questions about bee mother
- What does bee mother mean?
- Bee mother means a queen bee (perceived as the mother of the hive).
- How do you use bee mother in a sentence?
- Astonishingly, bee mothers can decide whether the egg they lay will develop into a male or female.
- What part of speech is bee mother?
- Bee mother is a noun.
- What is the plural of bee mother?
- The plural of bee mother is bee mothers.
Words near bee mother in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bee mother (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “bee mother.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bee_mother. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.