A recent compilation from Culture.pl contains a long article on entomological etymology. Here are some excerpts on bees and wasps.
In a survey conducted by linguist Marcin Maciołek for his doctoral thesis Kształtowanie się nazw owadów w języku polskim. Procesy nominacyjne a językowy obraz świata (The Formation of Names of Bugs in Polish: Nominative Processes and the Linguistic Image of the World) in 2012, some respondents indicated the bee as an example of a typical owad (bug). Although the astonishing diversity of this group of animals does not allow for the identification of a single, prototypical member, the bee is certainly one of its more charming representatives. Due to their usefulness, bees evoke a rather positive attitude in humans, evidenced, among other things, by the frequently used diminutive pszczółka (little bee). For centuries, they have been a symbol of industriousness, as evidenced, among other things, by citations from the Bible. The bee was also considered a divine, a sacred animal, which is why in Polish the word used for their dying is umrzeć (used for humans), not zdechnąć (used for animals). The designation of a bee was sometimes associated with a taboo: it could not be spoken of after dusk lest the evil powers of the night harm it, hence the interchangeable terms boży robak (God’s worm) / święty robak (holy worm).
The word pszczoła has Proto-Slavic origins, probably even Proto-Indo-European – if we go back that far in the language, we will discover that the Polish pszczoła and the English bee most probably come from the same Proto-Indo-European form *bhiquelā! In Proto-Slavic, the proto-word was *bьčela or *bъčela (they differ in the quality of the yer – a Proto-Slavic vowel). If we wanted to discover the etymology of Polish pszczoła (bee), we’d discover that it is an onomatopoeic word: probably the Proto-Slavic root was an onomatopoeic *bъk-, *bъč-, related to the Proto-Slavic verb *bučati, brzęczeć – to buzz (about bugs). The suffix *-ela would indicate the meaning of *bъčela as ‘that which buzzes’.
The name of this bug was initially pczoła in Poland, with the consonant š (sz) eventually inserted. Language strives for economy, also in terms of articulation, hence the consonant group pč- (pcz-) was expanded to pšč- due to the desire to avoid excessive articulatory energy input. This also explains why the spelling of the word pszczoła is an orthographic exception, since there was never any ‘r’ in this word that could become a ‘rz’.
Wasps do not enjoy as good a reputation as their ‘cousins’, the bees. They are not useful from the point of view of humans – they are considered negative, dangerous, unpleasant bugs, in contrast to the hard-working, holy bees. An important feature of wasps, one with which they are usually most associated, is their painful sting. You can also say about someone that they are as evil as a wasp or as sharp as a wasp (zły jak osa and cięty jak osa, respectively]. Due to the gender of this noun in Polish, this term is usually used in relation to women. Only a woman can have a wasp waist – this expression is associated with the characteristic narrowing of the body structure of this bug. Unlike other phraseologisms related to wasps, however, it does not have a negative connotation but is rather a compliment.
The etymology of osa is not related to its ‘character traits’, however. It has Proto-Indo-European roots, and the names of this family in other languages indicate a common origin reconstructed by researchers to Proto-Indo-European *ṷobhsā, osa. Baltic, Romance and Germanic languages have preserved the initial v-, so for example, in Lithuanian, osa is vapsvà; in Latin it is vespa; and in English it is ‘wasp’. As Maciołek writes, in accordance with the law of the open syllable in the Proto-Slavic languages [all syllables had to end in a vowel, ed.], the intra-word consonant group *-bs- was simplified into -s-, hence the Proto-Indo-European *ṷobhsā became the Proto-Slavic *(v)osa, and today in Polish it has the form osa.
Andrzej Bańkowski sees the meaning of the name osa in the verb *webh-, ‘to weave’, which is related to the fact that wasps weave their nests from plant fibres. Wasp nests are a very important place for them, and they defend it fiercely. Maciej Rak cites a regional saying: włożyć kij w gniazdo os (‘to put a stick in a wasps’ nest’, meaning ‘to irritate, to provoke a bad situation’; in general language, this saying is related to ants: włożyć kij w mrowisko, ‘to put a stick in an anthill’).
Far Outliers 