Bees

Bees (or BEEEEEEEES!) are curved yellow insects that buzz and make honey (cf. ACF Nationals 2008, VCU packet). They were the subject of a long-running quizbowl inside joke.

Around 2007, Andrew Hart and Rob Carson were practicing on some old NAQT packets when they noticed a large number of references to bees across many of the packets. This led people to snidely exclaim "BEES!" as a stand-in for mocking the high bee content in NAQT packets or the quirky/limited content of NAQT packets more broadly. The bee references have only picked up since.

In an ironic twist, this often led people to be especially primed to notice a preponderance of references to bees outside NAQT questions as well; it's unclear thus far whether there are actually more bee references now than there used to be or this is an instance of confirmation bias. Minnesota Open 2009, which Hart and Carson both edited, even featured a tossup on L.L. Langstroth, the "father of American beekeeping."

A small icon of a bee appears as the icon for the Quizbowl Resource Center; another appears on the logo of the National History Bee.

The prevalence of bees and/or "BEEEEEEEES!" jokes in quizbowl inspired the name of the hypothetical future statkeeping software BEeS.