A linguistic documentation of beekeeping in Kambaata

International audience This paper present results of a collaborative project on the language of beekeeping in Kambaata, which documents the lexicon and recorded (in written, audio and photographic form) the practical steps of honey production and the cultural setting in which honey is consumed. The introduction describes the data collection process under the conditions of the corona pandemic. Next, an overview of the beekeeping lexicon is given. Our commented wordlist encompasses ~150 entries and divides into lexemes that are unique to the semantic field of beekeeping and lexemes that are also used in other fields but adopt a particular meaning or are of central importance in the beekeeping context. We provide selected examples of how our lexical entries are organized: transcription, grammatical information, translation, semantic field, example, photo and audio file. We systematically check our data against the Kambaata dictionary by Alemu (2016). In the third part, we present excerpts from procedural texts on the beekeeper’s work and the social significance of honey, a narrative, and poems that were created in praise of the bees. The paper highlights the benefits of the collaboration between a linguist, local beekeeping experts, authors and a photographer.