[Q] From Dan Flave-Novak:
“The American institution known as the spelling bee has been getting a lot of attention recently — why is this competition named after a stinging insect? Or is it?”
[A] It used to be assumed that a bee in this sense was indeed named after the insect, an allusion to its social and industrious nature. But these days the experts prefer to point instead to the English dialect been or bean.
These were variations on boon, once widely used in the sense of “voluntary help, given to a farmer by his neighbours, in time of harvest, haymaking, etc” (as the English Dialect Dictionary put it a century ago). It’s likely that the link was reinforced by the similarity in names and by the allusion; perhaps also because at one time been was the plural of bee in some dialects (a relic of the old English plural that survives in the standard language in a few words such as oxen).
Bee in this sense appears in the eighteenth century. It’s hard today to realise how interdependent people were in earlier times, not least on the North American frontier. Many annual tasks, such as the harvest, needed neighbours to help each other to get the crops in because no one farm had enough labour to do it alone; clearing land and barn-raisings were major communal efforts; families without the skills for some task could call on neighbours through reciprocal arrangements. It was a complex system that was more like a mutual labour exchange and insurance against individual calamity than the selflessness that is sometimes evoked in romantic images. Bees were also often social occasions, of course, with food and entertainment provided to reward people for their help, and sometimes also to an extent competitive to keep people working.
There were many sorts of bees during the year. Several acquired their own fixed and standard names, such as apple-bee (picking and storing apples), paring-bee (peeling apples), husking-bee (husking ears of corn, later also a shucking bee or a corn-shucking bee), k
nitting bee, quilting-bee, and raising-bee (for barn raisings). These start to appear in print from the 1820s and are common by the middle of the century. Others handled sheep shearing, haymaking, threshing corn, and spinning wool.
In the early 1870s, the idea of bee began to be extended to situations that had some kind of communal basis, but weren’t farm work. Early examples were disquieting: hanging bee (1873) and lynching bee (1879), with whipping bee arriving in the 1890s.
Informal spelling contests among neighbours or in schools had long been held for recreation or instruction or as tests. They were called spelling matches, a name which appears in the USA in the 1840s. The term spelling bee wasn’t applied to them at the time, since bee was then firmly attached to the idea of communal manual work (yet another, spelldown, modelled on hoe-down, only arrived at the end of the century). The basis for most of these competitions was the famous Blue-Back Speller of Noah Webster, The Elementary Spelling Book, a work which sold more than 80 million copies in the 100 years after its publication in 1783.
In 1874, US local newspapers start to report public spelling matches or spelling contests with an admission fee and in which contestants competed for prizes. Some were run as part of vaudeville shows (one is advertised in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on 5 April 1875). Early examples were mostly in the eastern USA (Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania), but the idea soon spread westwards. It became a craze, often referred to as spelling fever. In March 1875, a local paper in Ohio reported that “The spelling fever is spreading rapidly”. The Oakland Daily Evening Tribune of California noted the following month that “The spelling fever is playing bob with our pet phrases; ‘too diaphanously attenuated’ is now the substitute for ‘too thin.’”
It was in July 1874 that I’ve found the term spelling bee appearing for the first time, in a report of a school event in Brooklyn in which a pupil recites The Spelling Bee by Nellie Watkins as an elocution exercise. (The term must obviously be older than this, though nothing like pre-Revolution as H L Mencken claimed in The American Language. It would be nice to learn more about the work and Ms Watkins, but both have vanished into the obscurity of history.) In March the next year the term is recorded for one of these public contests and on 1 April 1875, the Bucks Co
unty Gazette of Bristol, Pennsylvania enthused: “On Thursday evening last, your correspondent attended the much talked of ‘Spelling Bee’ held in the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, and enjoyed it exceedingly.” The term spread quickly and widely — in April that year the Oakland paper I’ve mentioned said of a forthcoming entertainment that “The ladies will be behind the age if they don’t have a spelling bee.”
Less than a month later the Staffordshire Sentinel, a newspaper in Stoke-on-Trent, reported that “On Monday evening an entertainment of novel, amusing, and instructive character, was given in the Temperance Hall, Dresden — a spelling match, or what the Americans call a spelling bee.” The craze became general this side of the big water for some while, at least according to Harper’s New Monthly Magazine of June 1876: “The spelling-bee mania has spread over all England, and attacked London with especial virulence.” But the term, though recorded a few times, soon died out in the UK: The Dictionary of Birmingham by Thomas Harman and Walter Showell of 1885 says that “The first ‘Spelling Bee’ held in Birmingham took place January 17th, 1876. Like many other Yankee notions, it did not thrive here.”
The popularity of the spelling bee was so great that it redefined bee for many Americans to mean a public contest of knowledge. During the craze, other sorts were invented, including the historical bee and the geographical bee; reformulated as history bee and geographic bee these are still around, with math bee being added in the 1950s. Australians also know of working bees and busy bees for various kinds of communal activity.
The craze didn’t last long: as early as May 1875 the Daily Gazette And Bulletin of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, remarked that “The spelling fever has almost entirely subsided, and the buzz of
the bee is scarcely heard any more.” This was premature, at least for other parts of the USA, but the evidence suggests it was not a long-lived fashion; spelling bees went back to being popular in a low-key way, as they had been before the craze erupted. The modern national contest dates from 1925.
In 1878, Bret Harte wrote a comic poem, The Spelling Bee at Angels, about one that took place among bored gold miners in a bar, news of this new pastime having reached them all the way from San Francisco. It went splendidly until phthisis and gneiss turned up. It’s hard to think what they would have made of appoggiatura, the winning word in this year’s National Scripps Spelling Bee.
retrieved in full and pasted here... as written today, Sep 27, 2007: at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-spe2.htm 
