Beware the Dearth...

Not a common word in every day conversation.  Sounds a bit Lewis Carroll even!

When I went to bee school, constantly reenforced was the need to FEED YOUR BEES. Photos of big colonies all dead due to lack of food in the spring made an impression!  If your bees stop taking the syrup, then stop after still offering it one or more times...but keep watch for the next time of dearth, which falls here in Connecticut in the high summer..  

I had  never heard the word dearth used so many times in a two hour period.  I think I had not heard the word dearth that many times in my life actually...I guess it is a beekeepers word.  
Let me go look...
Yup, that is the beekeeper's word of choice for the period of not enough nectar.  Succinct.  Very Jane Austen.  
  
Hmm, I wonder how long dearth has been the word of choice?  
Let me go look...
1885, 1890 everyone phrases it that way.  (And, no, I am not going to try to find who first used it :-)

I have to share this.  I love the first lines.

When Venus is crusty, and Mars in a miff, Their tipple is prime nectar-toddy and stiff, — And shall we not toast, like their godships above, The lad we esteem, and the lady we love ? ... She knew no dearth of honest mirth to cheer both son and sire,  But kept it up o'er wassail cup around the Christmas fire.     1840

And to round out my side trip:

The facts about the history of the word dearth are quite simple: the word derives from the Middle English form "derthe," which has the same meaning as our modern term. That Middle English form is assumed to have developed from an Old English form that was probably spelled "dierth" and was related to "dēore," the Old English form that gave us the word dear. ("Dear" also once meant "scarce," but that sense of the word is now obsolete.) Some form of "dearth" has been used to describe things that are in short supply since at least the 13th century, when it often referred to a shortage of food. 

I've spent hours commuting  to work listening to Audible's The Adventure of English:  The Biography of a Language  by Melvyn Bragg.  
The reader is excellent and even an uneducated ear like mine begins to easily work out what is being said when he reads excerpts in Old English.  Reading the history of the words we use is like reading a history of wars.  Fascinating.