Latin said mel; Germanic said hunagą — the same sweetness, two entirely unrelated words. Spanish inherits directly from Latin, arriving at miel through Roman poetry; Esperanto, built to be universal, reaches for the same Romance stem and accidentally becomes Spanish's cognate. English stands apart, carrying a Germanic word whose PIE prehistory is honestly uncertain. Chinese names the maker alongside the made: 蜂蜜 embeds the bee in the word itself, refusing to let honey exist without its source.
Old English hunig is attested from the earliest manuscripts; the Proto-Germanic reconstruction *hunagą is secure, but a deeper PIE connection remains genuinely unresolved.
A phono-semantic compound: 虫 places it among insects; 夆 supplies the syllable. The character makes no visual claim about bees beyond their insect nature — it names by sound as much as by category.
宓 lends the pronunciation mì; 虫 at the base marks it as an insect product. The folk reading — 'sweetness necessarily gathered under a roof' — is poetically apt but secondary to 宓's phonetic role.
蜜 alone also functions as a standalone word for honey and sweetness; the compound 蜂蜜 specifies 'bee honey' and is the standard modern term.
Two ancient words for the same golden thing, and neither one ever knew the other existed.