BEE (דְּבﯴרָה֒, H1805, bee all Eng. VSS). Some five families of hymenopterous insects are called bees. All are winged and feed almost entirely on plant nectar and pollen, in return doing much flower fertilization. Most bees are solitary, but the honey bees form a highly organized society. Hebrew Debōrāh prob. covered all true bees and also perhaps other similar insects, as is the common usage of the Eng. bee. Two of the four occurrences clearly refer to the honey bee with its swarming habit “chased you as bees do” (Deut 1:44; Ps 118:12). Some authorities take the bees in Samson’s incident (Judg 14:8) to be honey bees, but Zeuner considers them to be another species (A Hist. of Dom. Animals, ch. 27 [1963]). The fourth passage is fig., “The Lord will whistle....for the bee” (Isa 7:18). A possible reference is to a Palestinean tradition of calling honey bees by whistling. The honey bee was the source of the world’s basic sweetening material until the 18th cent. In backward countries today honey is still collected in quantity from wild bees, but domestication began early in ancient Egypt, and continued throughout Biblical times. Some, perhaps much, of the honey used in Pal. was obtained from bees under some control.