Getting Rid of Confusion in Beekeeper-Speak

Season 9 Episode 11: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Getting Rid of Confusion in Beekeeper-Speak

What exactly is a bee colony?

The answer seems obvious. Until beekeepers, scientists and computers all need to agree.

In this episode of About Bees, Culture, and Curiosity, we explore an international effort to create a common language for bees and beekeeping. Researchers working with Apimondia and the EU Pollinator Hub are developing standardized terminology and the Pollinator Ontology, or PolOn: a structured system that defines concepts and shows how they relate to one another.

Why does this matter? Terms such as colony, hive, swarm, colony strength, winter loss, queenless, Varroa infestation, wild and feral can mean slightly different things to different people, research groups and countries. Those differences become important when scientists try to combine thousands (or millions) of observations.

Along the way, we look at old beekeeping words, multilingual terminology, Eva Crane's pioneering dictionaries, FAIR scientific data, and the growing importance of standardized information in an age of artificial intelligence.

Beekeepers have always exchanged bees, equipment and ideas across borders. Now researchers are trying to make sure the information can travel just as easily.

LINKS:

https://apimondia.org/one-language-for-bees/

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0353382&

This podcast was

Recorded September 2026 in Calgary.

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