Talk:honey bee

I commented out the note that honey bee is more common than honey bee after checking 4 big online dictionaries. AHD, Collins, Encarta, and Merriam-Webster all list honeybee while none lists honey bee. This might not imply that the two-word variant is not more common but it does imply that it's less acceptable. &mdash; Hippietrail 16:38, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

you'd be somewhat wrong in your assessment
I actually talked to the good folks at Merriam-Webster. They did a blind count of instances of honeybee and honey bee. They don't factor in the quality or nature of the source. The occurances of honeybee just barely edged out honey bee in usage. However, the usage is more complex than that. Science and Americans tend to prefer honey bee; the British tend to prefer honeybee. One should really consider publications that matter, not a blind count. Dictionaries will list combined words in preference to open spellings if the combined is acceptable.

Regardless, I will leave the statement out for now since I don't want to waste even more of time researching this.

-tonica Tue, 24 Jan 2006 20:14:12 -0500