There is nothing special about the feminine word for bee (nahl) since it is feminine in Arabic anyway.
Denis Giron already showed that the Jews knew that worker bees are female.
First, with the issue of the bee, what Aristotle actually said was that others… Now he came to dispute - excuse me - he tried to dispute the belief that bees were females and drones male. And the issue, however, is that he started out by saying: it is asserted by others that bees - worker bees - that these bees are female and drones are male. This is what he said. He said also that they copulated. “It is asserted by others that these insects copulate, and that the bees are female and the drones male.” So Aristotle starts out by saying that this is asserted by others. This was said before he wrote his book and then he gave his reasons for why he disagrees. Now, of course, as history bares out, Aristotle was wrong. But nonetheless, he was debating with somebody - maybe someone who was not alive anymore at his time, but nonetheless he was debating with somebody who claimed that the worker bees were female and the drones were male. So this was said before the Qur’an was written - the issue of the gender of worker bees. So that in itself proves that it is possible for a mere human being to argue such.
Actually, I would like to also bring another piece of evidence with regard to this, which is a lot more clear on this issue. And this is actually from the Talmud, from tractate Bava Bratra, which is a tractate in the Babylonian Talmud - it is section 18a. There is a verse where there is a debate about plants and bees - if one man owns bees and another man owns plants - and at one point one of the people in the debate says to another one - this is in the Talmud - I will give you the Hebrew and the Aramaic first. He says: charcheq d’vorakh min chardla’ee, which means “distance your bees from my mustard plant”. Now the word that he used for “your bees” is d’vorakh, and it is from the Hebrew word for bee and the Aramaic word - well actually Aramaic has two words for bee, but this particular word for bee is feminine. So starting right away they are saying keep your bees away from my mustard plants, but he is using a feminine word for bee. So already bee is in the female. And then he explains why he wants the bees to be kept away from his plant, and he says: she-ba’ot v’okhlot lighlooghei chardla’ee - which means “they are coming and eating the flowers,” or “coming and gnawing on the flowers of my mustard plant.”
Now here is where it gets even more interesting. The first part, “they are coming,” is she-ba’ot - ba’ot is actually conjugated in the female plural. “They are coming”. And this is an interesting point about Hebrew grammar: “they are coming,” being plural femine is interesting because it is stating - well let me explain something about Hebrew grammar. In Hebrew grammar, if you have a group that is plural - let us say you have all boys - if you have all boys you refer to them in the masculine plural. If you have a mixed group of boys and girls, males and females, you refer to them, again, as masculine plural. So that means that if you have one hundred women and one man, and you want to say something that the group is doing, like let us say you want to say they are writing - that the group is writing - if a hundred girls and one man, you will say kotevim. So even if the males are out numbered a million to one, nonetheless you treat mixed groups as masculine plural. The only time you use feminine plural, which is used here in the Talmud, is if the entire group is feminine - there is not a single male in the bunch. And again, in this verse in the Talmud it says: she-ba’ot - masculine feminine, they come - v’okhlot - again, mascu… I’m sorry(!), feminine-plural. I apologize, feminine plural, she-ba’ot, “they come,” and then v’okhlot, again feminine plural, “they gnaw on” or “they eat,” and then it goes on to say “my flowers”. So what this verse is saying in the Talmud, which was written before the Qur’an - it predates the Qur’an, it is essentially saying that it takes it for granted that the bees that come to the flowers are all female. Now I have given two points: One, before Aristotle, someone said that the bees are female and the drones are male. Also, in the Talmud, it essentially treats bees, in this particular tractate - there’s another tractate that does it differently, but in this particular tractate it takes it for granted that bees - the ones that comes to the flowers and gnaw on the flowers - are feminine.
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