A digital hive sits on your computer desktop and hums contentedly, if you decide to turn on its noise making feature. Bees come and go happily attending to the needs of the digital flowers that you have placed around your screen's peripheries.

All is well and in perfect harmony, but if you poke the nest with your cursor, an angry swarm emerges and begins to surround whatever block of text on which you have been working. Moving methodically along the lines, offending, misspelt words are repeatedly stung into submission, and either corrected or dispatched to the bottom of the screen in the form of broken, twitching letter fragments.

Once spell checking is complete, a few puffs from the digital smoker will pacify the swarm, and they can be shepherded back to the confines of their hive.

The extra words, and twisted remnants of the offending letters can now be swept up and placed on the compost heap for feeding the flowers.
-- xenzag, Sep 03 2006

Bees as storage mechanism http://en.wikipedia...cworld)#Description
About halfway down the para [bibliotaphist, Sep 04 2006]

Flann O'Brien play Rhapsody in Stephen's Green http://www.sluggero...s/2004/11/index.php
Scroll down to November 26, 2004 entry [xenzag, Sep 04 2006]

In advanced mode, the bees could do a complex dance that tells you the distance and direction to the spelling error.
-- phundug, Sep 03 2006


Do you get a pot of honey for every 1000 words without an error?
-- wagster, Sep 04 2006


Honey Traps
-- xenzag, Sep 04 2006


Insert Pratchett reference here ... [link]
-- bibliotaphist, Sep 04 2006


//How about they sting you (with and electric shock through the keyboard) when you spell it wrong. After a while you won't need it at all and your nest will be nice and quiet.//

That's what the halfbakery is for, remember? My spelling has improved 120% since I started reading/ typing here. Math and grammar, on the other hand...
-- NotTheSharpestSpoon, Sep 04 2006


the Pratchet reference is interesting... but his notion of using ants/bugs is nothing new - Flann O'Brian, wrote of such matters when describing a society of ants, in a lost play called Rhapsody in Stephen's Green.
-- xenzag, Sep 04 2006


Am I missing something? This is no more (or less) than a pun, correct?
-- James Newton, Sep 05 2006


are you missing something ? yes you are missing something. This is not a pun, it's an idea for a piece of software, which is why it's subtitled "Spell checking software".

I don't make up puns, they occur naturally. And besides the title would not be a pun, but more of a homonym (in its zoological meaning capacity) if you wish to engage in semantic detail.
-- xenzag, Sep 05 2006



random, halfbakery