queen bee
1
3.4
- noun
- /kwin bi/
:
abeja reina
- Most queen bees in northeastern Mexico are now Africanized.
- the queen bee can lay
But this is what the bees make for the queen bee.
- But this is what the bees make for the queen bee.
Examples
-
From Ezekiel Toth, after carefully examining the conditions under which the colonies were raised, Stefan purchased a queen bee and two cans.
Fiction book (1993) -
Hatched from a queen bee.
Fiction book (1994) -
And it's the queen bee who rules the hive.
-
My cousins and the aunts became queen bees who trailed a cloud of workers and drones behind them.
Fiction book (1994) -
Semen is about to be injected into the oviducts of a queen bee.
Academic text (2004) -
PHOTO (COLOR): Entomologist John Harbo prepares a queen bee for artificial insemination.
Academic text (2004) -
A queen bee is crucial for the colony because she lays all the eggs.
-
In the hive, the queen bee is responsible for reproduction and maintaining the colony's population.
-
During the summer, a single queen bee can lay thousands of eggs to ensure the colony thrives.
Synonyms
60
5.9
The main female in an insect or mole rat colony that produces young
How Fertile
1
3.4
- Specialized
54
4.5
Surface Forms
Morphology
queen + bee
The compound is directly interpretable from its parts: 'queen' denotes the female leader and 'bee' evokes the social, hierarchical insect group, so together they straightforwardly suggest a dominant female within a group. This beehive-as-social-group metaphor is common cross-linguistically and follows a simple compositional pattern, so a B1 learner who knows both words will very likely infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Queen bee comes from real beehives: the queen is the only female bee that lays eggs and keeps the hive alive, so the name simply describes her role.