Just as the Jaredites collected birds and fish, they must also collect insects. Of course the specific insect would be the most useful, and that is the honey bee.
Linguistic: The word deseret in the record of Ether was adopted by the saints. It became a name for the industriousness of the bees, and therefore appropriate as the name of the territory that became known as Utah. Prior to having that legal name, the saints called it the territory of Deseret, and the name continues in LDS culture to this day. The source of that name is this verse in Ether.
Nibley has suggested:
“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.
From the first, students of hieroglyphic were puzzled as to what sound value should be given to the bee-picture. fn By the New Kingdom, according to Sethe, the Egyptians themselves had forgotten the original word, fn and Grapow designates the bee-title of honor as “unreadable.” fn Is it not strange that such a common and very important word should have been forgotten? What happened? Something not at all unusual in the history of cult and ritual, namely the deliberate avoidance or prohibition of the sacred word. 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.” fn 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); the “s” in dsrt had a heavy sound, perhaps best represented by “sh,” but designated by a special character—an “s” with a tiny wedge above it by which the Egyptians designated both their land and crown they served. Now when the crown appears in place of the bee, it is sometimes called bit “bee,” fn yet the bee, though the exact equivalent of the crown, is never by the same principle called dsrt. This certainly suggests deliberate avoidance, especially since dsrt also means “red,” a word peculiarly applicable to bees. If the Egyptians were reluctant to draw the picture of the bee “for superstitious reasons,” they would certainly hesitate to pronounce its true name. As meaning “red” the word could be safely uttered, but never as meaning “bee.” A familiar parallel immediately comes to mind. To this day no one knows how the Hebrew name of God, YHWH, is to be pronounced, because no good Jew would dare to pronounce it even if he knew, but instead when he sees the written word always substitutes another word, Adonai, in its place to avoid uttering the awful sound of the Name. Yet the combination of sounds HWH is a common verb root in Hebrew and as such used all the time. (Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert/The World of the Jaredites/There Were Jaredites, edited by John W. Welch with Darrell L. Matthews and Stephen R. Callister [Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book Co., Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1988], 189-90.)