Disputatio:Apis mellifera

Article to correspond to en:Bee?

This article, which currently begins "Apis (binomen: Apis mellifera) est parva insecta," is about a specific bee, the honeybee, one of twenty thousand species of bees. Accordingly, Vicipaedia loses points in Wikimedia (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias_by_sample_of_articles) for not having an article equivalent to en:Bee, which currently begins "Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants." Therefore, the current article Apis should be renamed Apis mellifera, paving the way for a new article Apis, to become equivalent to en:Bee. IacobusAmor 05:25, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

Or you could make an article Apis (genus), so that we may continue to use the word 'apis', as the Romans did, to refer to the honeybee. --Fabullus 07:46, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

PS: I see that Apis (genus) exists already. In English the articles seem to be cross-linked. --Fabullus 07:46, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

When I checked last night, en:Bee had no link with Vicipaedia, and that's why we're losing points. IacobusAmor 13:18, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

In view of the large degree of confusion in other wikipedias, too, I now agree. Apis should be moved to Apis mellifera, which should be linked to en:European honey bee; and Apis (genus) should be linked to en:Honey bee. Apis should then be made into a disambiguation page, disambiguating between Apis mellifera, Apis (genus), Apis (religio Aegyptia) (the Egyptian bull-god), etc. --Fabullus 09:12, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

Done. I now see I have have missed your original point, Iacobe, to create a page to correspond to en:Bee. I don't think simply Apis would be a good name, in the first place because I don't think ancient Romans would have used this word to describe every species subsumed under en:Bee, --Fabullus 11:09, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

Maybe not, but both Cassell's and White's dictionaries define apis as 'a bee', not as 'a honeybee'. Of course in English, bee can refer to the honeybee and any of the other insects in the superfamily Apoidea, and that kind of polysemy is probably common in all languages. (In Samoan, the same word, borrowed from the English, even includes wasps.) So maybe Vicipaedia could have (1) Apis, equivalent to en:Bee, (2) Apis (genus), including all insects in the genus, and, for now, before related species get added, (3) Apis mellifera (italicized). ¶ The discussion become clearer if we consider that, after Apis mellifera, the next most famous insect that's an Apiformis is not an Apis (genus) at all: it's a Bombus (genus). -- IacobusAmor 13:18, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

I think that is an anglicism. In English you say Bumblebee which suggests that the bumblebee is a kind of bee. In other languages, however, like Dutch (Hommel), German (Hummel), French (Bourdon) or Latin (Bombus), the name of these insects does not include the word 'bee', and so we do not normally think of bumblebees as bees, nor would the ancient Romans have. --Fabullus 14:21, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

If it's an anglicism, it's also a samoanicism! ¶ Another English word for 'bumblebee' is dumbledore, which, as you see, doesn't include the word bee. IacobusAmor 15:11, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

in the second place because Apis is ambiguous (that's why I made it a disambiguation page). What about Anthophila, the unranked taxon name for en:Bee, cited in the second line of the English article? --Fabullus 09:46, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

PS: Or what about Apiformes, the unranked taxon name given in the corresponding German article de:Bienen? In any case, it would be useful to find out whether Apiformes and Anthophila are synonymous. If so, I prefer the first, because it includes the word 'apis'. --Fabullus 11:09, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

According to this page Anthophila is a genus name also. Confusing ... --Fabullus 11:25, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for thinking about this and trying to find a solution. Maybe no good solution is possible. IacobusAmor 13:18, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that may be the correct conclusion ... We have three requirements, (a) to get it right, (b) to have an article or a redirect corresponding to classical Latin "Apis", (c) to be able to place a link to English "Bee" which the bots will not remove.

(a) Getting it right is easy: we can make an article for any and every node in the taxonomic chain. We cannot easily make an article for "Anthophila" or "Apiformes", however, because those are not really accepted as nodes (and, unless I'm mistaken, we have no descriptions of them).

(b) Names of animals and plants in natural languages tend to have a focus point and a variable grey area around. Thus, although Pliny at one point talks about kinds of bees (NH 11.59), when Latin authors say "apis" they nearly always mean "Apis mellifera". So, either we have a short article Apis explaining this, or we make Apis a redirect to "Apis mellifera".

(c) As you gentlemen have said, English "bee" does not correspond closely in its full spread of meaning to Latin "apis". (Believe it or not, until I had a holiday in France I had never seen a honeybee: to me as a child, bumblebees were the typical bee.) So, how do we find an article to link to English "bee"? The obvious one, really, would be a page Apoidea, but English also has an article "Apoidea", so that link would not stick. It's not perfect, anyway, because Apoidea includes wasps, while English "bee" does not. I do finally have a suggestion ... We start a page "Apis" discussing the semantic range of the classical term and of the equivalent words in other languages -- an article in the important field of folk taxonomy -- and we link the English article "Bee" to it. We would, of course, also want an Apis (discretiva) listing all meanings of the word, bee and non-bee. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 16:50, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that should work, as long as en:Bee links to an article, not a disambiguation page. IacobusAmor 16:57, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

Andrea locuto, causa finita! Cedo vobis. Paginam discretivam movebo ad Apis (discretiva), ita ut Iacobus paginam Apis ad libitum recensere possit. --Fabullus 17:02, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

In en:, Anthophila redirects to en:Bee, so maybe our article that includes 20,000 bees but excludes wasps should be Anthophila (but in the singular?). IacobusAmor 18:08, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)

Fabullus suggested that, above. In theory, yes, why not? Though I believe we have no definition or classification of "Anthophila" in this sense; if that's correct, it may be difficult to write the article. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 21:35, 7 Martii 2009 (UTC)