There are seven references to bees or honey in the Book of Mormon, and without exception they all belong to the Old World. Lehi's wanderers, starved for sweets, gloried as Arabs always do in the discovery of honey—but that was in Arabia. The Jaredites carried hives of bees from Babel into the wilderness for a journey of many years, but there is no mention of bees in the cargo of their ships (Ether 5:4)—a significant omission, since our author elsewhere goes out of his way to mention them. The survival of the word bee in the New World after the bees themselves had been left behind is a phenomenon having many parallels in the history of language, but the Book of Mormon nowhere mentions bees or honey as existing in the Western Hemisphere.