If you’ve ever heard someone refer to a person as ‘making a beeline’ toward something, that’s a great example of an idiom.
It’s time for another post on a popular idiom. This time we’re looking at the popular phrase related to “making a beeline” for something.
Idioms are phrases that have a specific meaning that may not be clear at face value. While they’re a convenient way to say something, they can easily throw less-experienced English speakers.
In this case, the phrase does not require that anyone obtain a honey bee. It does, however, refer to a bee’s supposed behavior.
You have to know an interesting thing about the bee
Most of the time, when we encounter a bee, they’re just sort of exploring flowers near us. They fly from one to another, sometimes zig-zagging around as if scouting for pollen. (That’s probably exactly what they are doing, in fact.)
In fact, after reading a few bee-related sites and forums, some beekeepers suggest that the bee will fly in more of a zig-zag pattern when they’re leaving their next to better familiarize themselves with their surroundings.
But bee experts say that when it’s time for them to return to the hive, they take a more direct approach. They are said to fly almost in a straight line back to their hive.
I’m not a beekeeper and prefer to keep a safe distance between these amazing insects. So I’m not enough of an expert to personally verify this. At the same time, I don’t really need to be. There is enough of an assumption on a bee’s behavior when returning to its hive to have led to the idiom involving the word beeline.
So when someone “makes a beeline” for something, they’re going straight there, taking a direct path. You can use the phrase literally, saying someone’s “making a beeline” to the bar if they’ve had a bad day. But you can also use it figuratively, suggesting an accountant “made a beeline” to the balance sheet, suggesting they jumped right into work.
The literal use is probably more common, but you can use the idiom to either mean taking a straight line from one place to another or taking a direct approach in making a point or accomplishing a goal.
And whether they truly do fly back to their hives in straight lines, we can still thank our little buzzing friends for this particular idiom.
