Spare a thought for …

… the long-suffering partners of beekeepers.

The idioms fishing widow, golf widow, or football widow are well known, although possibly a little sexist for this day and age. They refer to the abandoned spouse, left at home while the husband enjoys himself.

Use of these idioms ignores both the rise and rise of women's football, and the continuing fall in the marriage rate (now below 50%).

The term golf widow dates back to ~1890, although the general form of 'something' widow — as in California widow (meaning a woman abandoned by her husband during the Gold Rush, from ~1850), or grass widow (from 1529; a woman living apart from her husband {{1}}, though the etymology is more interesting; originally the term meant an unmarried woman with an illegitimate child) — are older.

'Beekeeping widow' is not one I've heard used, and a web search for it largely turns up discussion of spiders (black and false widow) in hives {{2}}.

Perhaps this is because beekeeping is practised by similar numbers of men and women?

I've tried to find some dependable numbers on this, and failed. There's a post featuring a heady mix of misogyny, politics, and religion on this topic in the Beekeeping Forum, though it provides relatively few insights into the male/female ratio of beekeepers 😞.

In my — very limited — experience, I see more male beekeepers in the audiences of my talks, but the organising committees of the associations who kindly invite me are often predominantly female {{3}}.

Furthermore, the younger the average age of the audience, the more likely there will be similar numbers of males and females.

So 'widows' is definitely inappropriate, and 'spouse' is also wrong (because of both the decline in the marriage rate, and the lack of any implied 'abandonment').

However, whatever the terminology, the partners of beekeepers have a lot to put up with … assuming that they are not themselves beekeepers.

And, if they are, they'll be familiar with the 'issues' described below 😉.