Does anyone have views on Beekeeper or bee keeper?

 



Webster's defines beekeeper as a person who keeps bees for producing honey.
 
In USA, bumble bees, leaf cutter bees, mason bees are 'kept' for pollination, but I've not heard any of my colleagues who keep and deploy these bees call themselves beekeepers, although technically they could.  Maybe they are the bee keepers?

To add to this thread, is an apiary a bee yard or a beeyard?  There's no beeyard or bee-yard in Webster's, but beeyard shows up in articles and books about honey bee.

FYI, this whole discussion became an issue of debate within my Ph.D. thesis committee, over 40 years ago.  I think it was over the term greenhouse to describe a building made with glass.   One of my major professors insisted that I had to re-type numerous pages of my 200+ page thesis, because I had mistakenly used the combined word.  

Fortunately, my thesis chair had started his career as a journalist, then got his degrees in entomology.  He argued for the American trend to combine words as they evolved from first time appearance to general usages, in fact, it's a distinctive feature of the English language.  Back 40 years ago, green-house, greenhouse was still changing; with greenhouse becoming the norm.  He convinced the majority of the committee, saving me a laborious and expensive re-type.

In those days, the final version of a thesis was typed on special sheets of paper from which the printer's would make up the plates to print.  I'm a good enough typist to produce the thesis draft, but the print version sheets had to follow exacting specifications.  Most of us saved up and hired the best departmental typist to produce the final print version of our thesis.

My thesis was the first to be typed on a new IMB Selectric typewriter, that came with rolls of white out paper for corrections.  

It was a bad day when the typist and I got the news from the print shop - the prepping solution  had stripped off all of the whited out corrections.  She had to  retype the whole thing, using the older, but reliable, liquid paper.  The paper tape was a failure; apparently we were one of the  first to use it and IBM hadn't properly tested it.

A third retype would have been a major cost factor, and both I and the typist were already worn out from the process of redoing most of the manuscript.  So the one word, two word issue is forever burned into my awareness - is it white out or whiteout?

 

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