[Pollinator] The link between bumblebees and Harry Potter

[David Inouye]

 From Jim Cane, posted on the bumblebee listserv list BOMBUS-L:

Vince Tepedino at our lab came across this use of "dumbledore" in Thomas
Hardy's first book, "Under the Greenwood Tree", in which one character
accuses the other of being a "miserable dumbledore".   Nooo, he is not
referring to the wizard in the Harry Potter series. Rather, it turns out
that this was a colloquialism for bumblebees in rural England at the
time, as he found in the Oxford English Dictionary.  To whit:

Earliest use 1787

Dumbledore:

     A humble-bee or bumble-bee; also dial. a cockchafer.

1787 GROSE Prov. Gl., Dumble-dore, an humble, or bumble-bee. 1799
SOUTHEY in Robberds Mem. W. Taylor I. 264 Is it not the humble-bee, or
what we call the 'dumble dore',a word whose descriptive droning deserves
a place in song? 1837  Doctor IV. Interch. xvi. 383 Of Bees, however,
let me be likened to a Dumbledore, which Dr. Southey says is the most
goodnatured of God's Insects. 1856 C. M. YONGE Daisy Chain I. xxvi.
(1879) 276 Buzzed and hummed over by busy, blacktailed yellow-banded
dumbledores. 1863 G. KEARLEY Links in Chain iii. 57 In Hampshire these
insects [humble bees] are Dumbledors, in other districts Bumble bees,
and hummel bees. 1880 Cornwall Gloss., Dumbledory, cockchafer.