The word deseret is evidently transliterated from the original record, but fortunately the interpretation is included in Moroni’s abridgment: “a honey bee.” (Ether 2:3.) This is one of the few Jaredite words transliterated in our present Book of Mormon; therefore it is of special significance to the scholars.
Dr. Hugh Nibley has written extensively on the background of this word, including the following ideas:
By all odds the most interesting and attractive passenger in Jared’s company is deseret, the honeybee. We cannot pass this creature by without a glance at its name and possible significance, for our text betrays an interest in deseret that goes far beyond respect for the feat of transporting insects, remarkable though that is. The word deseret we are told (Ether 2:3), “by interpretation is a honeybee,” the word plainly coming from the Jaredite language, since Ether (or Moroni) must interpret it. Now it is a remarkable coincidence that the word deseret, or something very close to it, enjoyed a position of ritual prominence among the founders of the classical Egyptian civilization, who associated it very closely with the symbol of the bee. The people, the authors of the so-called Second Civilization, seem to have entered Egypt from the northeast as part of the same great outward expansion of peoples that sent the makers of the classical Babylonian civilization into Mesopotamia. Thus we have the founders of the two main parent civilizations of antiquity entering their new homelands at approximately the same time from some common center—apparently the same center from which the Jaredites also took their departure, … the Egyptian pioneers carried with them a fully developed cult and symbolism from their Asiatic home. Chief among their cult objects would seem to be the bee, for the land they first settled in Egypt was forever after known as “the land of the bee,” and was designated in hieroglyphic by the picture of a bee, while every king of Egypt “in his capacity of ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’ ” bore the title, “he who belongs to the sedge and the bee.”From the first, students of hieroglyphic were puzzled as to what sound value should be given to the bee-picture… . We know that the bee sign was not always written down, but in its place the picture of the Red Crown, the majesty of Lower Egypt was sometimes “substituted for superstitious reasons.” If we do not know the original name of the bee, we do know the name of this Red Crown—the name it bore when it was substituted for the bee. The name was dsrt (the vowels are not known, but we can be sure they were all short)… . (Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites, pp. 184-85.)