Mark, it is a common English term for French beans / bush beans.
I wondered if that was the case, just bush beans as opposed to pole beans. What we call French beans mostly come just with pole growth type. My experience is that they have longer, thinner pods that are lighter green in color and most of them have white seeds. I like them a lot, but they’re not well adapted to my garden. As a rule, no white bean does as well here as brown or black beans.
I think it varies per country. Here in Poland dwarf bean means the size of a plant, and is followed by another term that defines whether it is supposed to be grown for dry seeds or for pods.
As to the seed colors, this is how they look like.
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Term “French beans” is not being used in Polish at all, these are called pole beans 
and again, followed by culinary usage type. The seeds are white, beige or brown.
I don’t think French really means much at all here except somebody, sometime, thought it sounded good as a marketing tool. Maybe it did really originate with varieties or customs in France, but I don’t know any French people to ask. The French beans in cans from the store are sliced lengthwise instead of cut or snapped, maybe that makes them French. 
The terminology I use is pole beans for those that climb and bush beans for the bushy ones. I call fresh beans green beans, some people call them snaps because they are ordinarily snapped into pieces to cook or can. Shelly beans, or shell outs as my mom called them are just green beans that have gone past prime to eat the pods but not yet dry.
My assessment of the difference between green beans and dry beans is just that. Any bean can be a dry bean, but the ones with tough or stringy pods are only good for dry. Without the tough stringy pod, a fully dry green bean is a bit harder to shell even when totally dry but still worth the effort, I think. One of my favorite green beans is an heirloom called Kentucky Wonder. I discovered that if dried and cooked by themselves with a bit of onion they taste almost just like they do as a green bean.
Then we have leather britches, but that’s just drying a whole bean pod at appropriate stage and then rehydrating them to cook. That’s really just another method of preserving them but some kinds do work better than others. Greasy beans are the best, I think. They are small beans and the pods don’t have any fuzz, so they look kind of shiny.
I’m a bit jealous of all the pretty colors in other folk’s beans. I’ve planted lots of them over the years but when left mostly to their own devices on my garden most of the colors select themselves out and I got tired of having to plant and pamper them instead of just turning them loose in the garden like the others. My beans are mostly white, black or brown but with lots of different shades and markings and lots of different sizes and shapes.
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The mix of colors I have shown you is a “natural” one that grows in my raised beds. I collect dry pods into one bucket and I shell the seeds into one jar. It looks different every year, but in my case it seems to get more colorful as years go by. Then, next year, I randomly select 120 seeds to plant. When I plant the seedling I do not even know how the seed looked like. It is always a surprize at the end of the season. In case of dwarf/bush beans I do not distinguish any varieties any more. I still do that for pole beans though. Moreover, in case of pole beans, I keep separate lines for beans that grow huge size seeds (for drying) and the ones with stringless pods (for cooking whole pods).
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I’ve tried pre-soaking, and it does increase germination rates, but it also makes the seeds way more difficult and more inconvenient for me to sow. And I don’t think I ultimately get more plants; in fact, with some species (like apple seeds), I seem to ten times as many seedlings, but none of them survive. Whereas if I direct sow them, I get a 10% germination rate, but almost all of them survive.
It may be that seeds in my climate need to be sown directly into the harsh conditions they’re going to experience in order to be ready to deal those challenges.
For apple seeds, I had 100% success with stratifying them in a fridge, and planting each seed as soon as its root is visible. I’ve used moist paper towel in a ziplock bag method, as well as just keeping seeds in moist vermiculite, in both cases it made wonders for apple seeds. The only difficult part was timing - seeds were germinated anywhere between 60 and 100 days from placing them in a fridge.
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Nice! That sounds like a great strategy for you in your climate, then! 
Interesting… which seeds is this a myth for?
I know Apple, Pear & Raspberry seeds require cold stratification to break dormancy. I’ve also noticed many wild mustards seeds germiniate in the cold but I don’t see them germinate in the heat, such as Shotcress (Cardamine hirsuta).
This could open a discussion about “presoaking… in what?” : in my experiment and since this first post, I’ve been seeing degrees of magnitude of difference regarding first germination and then growth, between the group soaked in the landrace juice and the group soaked in water, in favour of the landrace juice.
I’ll replicate the experiment differently : not in plain ground but in potting soil only, to get rid of some potential biases, still with corn. Could be done with other plants of course.
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I can’t get peas to germinate during warm weather, but they’re happy to germinate in cold. Any peas I sowed in spring that didn’t germinate then will wait to germinate until fall, no matter how moist the soil is. I think it’s true that some seeds will only germinate in cooler temperatures.
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Very interesting… does the same apply to Fava Beans?
Yep. Fava beans won’t germinate in the summer for me. Only early spring, late fall, or for that matter pretty much any time in winter. They’ll only sprout when it’s cold.
Now is this a Fabeae tribe thing? a just a Fabeae tribe tendency?
I also noticed that from all the Fabeae tribe plants I’ve seen germinate (Lentils, Peas, Fava Beans, ect) that they all germinate with their cotyledons in ground. Perhaps all Fabeae tribe plants do Hypogeal germination? They are mostly all cool season plants (Except that one Lathyrus spp. you told me about before).
Don’t most Lathyrus species grow in the summer? Obviously everlasting pea (Lathyrus latifolius) does, but don’t earthnut pea (Lathyrus tuberosum), cream pea (Lathyrus ochroleucus), and sweet pea (Lathyrus odoratus) all grow in the summer, too? Or am I remembering incorrectly about some of those? I haven’t grown any of those three yet.
I mean, I keep trying earthnut pea (Lathyrus tuberosum), but it keeps dying rather than growing for me. 
I wonder if our summer temperatures are too hot?
I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around with very few exceptions. Remember Garden Peas (Pisum sativum) are now also a Lathyrus species (Lathyrus oleraceus).
Certainly some species may flower into summer like with your Everlasting Peas (Lathyrus latifolius) but that might also be when they bolt. Even Peas, Lettuce & many other cool season brassicas + carrot family plants bolt in summer (if that’s what you mean by grow in summer).
Your summers are likely wayyy to hot, remember this is super intense UV ray Utah you live in 
, Utah sun say get scorched!!! so plants had to adapt ways around it with super thick leaves with hairs that reflect sun back.
Sam Thayer says they flower early to mid summer. I still need to research it more.
Everlasting pea (Lathyrus latifolius) grows exclusively during the warm season. In mid-October through mid-April, no part of the plant is alive above ground.
After our last hard freeze in mid-April, the leaves start appearing. The flowers start blooming in mid-June. The pods start shattering in mid-July. It keeps continually blooming and creating new pods and shattering them for the rest of the summer, until the first hard freeze around mid-October. As soon as that happens, the whole top of the plant turns brown and dead and falls over.
Garden peas have exactly the opposite growing season. How “exactly” is that opposite? Well, the week when peas start germinating is the same week that everlasting peas die . . . and the everlasting peas start blooming during the same week all my peas die. Literally, I collect my very last peas and my very first everlasting pea flowers during the same week every year, and I can transition straight from snacking on one to snacking on the other for the rest of the summer. It’s quite nice how well that timing lines up.
At least in my garden, earthnut pea (Lathyrus tuberosum) sprouts its tops during the same week that everlasting pea does. Unfortunately, it appears to be way less drought tolerant, because all of mine have survived only about a month and then croak in our summer heat. I once planted 21 earthnut pea tubers in the fall, and none of them made any leaves until April. Those leaves appeared at the same time as the everlasting pea leaves. So I think their growing season is the same as everlasting peas.
If Samuel Thayer says they bloom in early to mid summer, that makes me think they probably start flowering during the same week everlasting peas do — in my climate, usually the first or second week of June.
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