honeymaker en · NOUN
Etymology
From honey + maker.
Meanings
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(qualifier:often ludic or poetic when used at all, rare, uncountable) A maker of honey: a honey bee.
"I have seen bees so drunk that they could not fly, and in a condition of mental and physical paralysis, due to their copious imbibing, which would have killed one of your Bowery topers with envy. It is a very common thing on a California bee farm to find the transgressing honeymakers staggering about on the tops of flowers or writhing about in the dust of roads, and performing all the absurd antics of a rum-dazed man." […] "Can a bee get drunk on the nectar of flowers?" asked the reporter. "Possibly," returned the apiarist. "The saccharine secretions of some flowers by no means compose a teetotal drink. […]"
1899 September 14, “Animal life: stories, studies and sketches”, in Current Literature, volume 26, number 3, page 269:As worker bees gather nectar from flowers, tiny particles of pollen stick to their bodies and are carried back to the hive. The bees store this pollen as "beebread" in cells of the honeycomb. Later they feed it to young bees that are developing into workers and drones. (The few young larvae selected by the workers to become new queens are fed a special food—royal jelly—made by the workers in their own bodies.) Pollen, then, is necessary for producing the new bees that become new honeymakers.
1968 October 14, Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture, “Beekeeping for Beginners”, in Home and Garden Bulletin, number 158, U.S. Government Printing Office, page 7:A correspondent of the Washington Gazette, who has a very imaginative and fertile brain, tries to explain and account for a foolish story that has been again and again published in the papers all over the country, about bees losing their inclination to store honey, when they are placed in the South, where they experience but little of winter. The story, so often told, is as foolish as it is untrue […] The item referred to is as follows: THE RECKLESS BEE.—An experimenter in Southern agriculture told me the following history of Northern bees in the South. He took a colony of the little gratuitous honeymakers down to Florida […]
1883 January 14, “Habits of Bees in the South. From the American Bee Journal”, in The New England Apiarian, volume 1, number 1, page 16: