Julie's Reviews > The Bees

Lavish and unique, The Bees is a study in world-building. Laline Paull has taken a dissertation’s worth of dry facts about apian culture and transformed them into a dripping, droning, vibrating multi-caste tale of a beehive.

I nearly set aside this anthropomorphic dystopian thriller early on, because, well, it’s an anthropomorphic dystopian thriller. I did Animal Farm as a sophomore in high school; I wasn’t keen on revisiting those salad days. But Laline Paull’s gorgeous writing, and my immediate affection for Flora 717, the underdog sanitation bee (hee!) pulled me in like, oh damn, a bee to honey.

Paull’s orchard hive is enchanting. It is a castle complete, from corridors and antechambers, secret passageways and nurseries, great halls where tales are told in a furious shuffle of delicate feet and trembling antennae, and orgies of nectar unfold amidst throbbing abdomens and gaping spiracles. The Hive, presided over by the beloved Queen, thrives according to a carefully-tuned social hierarchy: from the lowliest sanitation worker and hard-working foragers to the crafty Teasel nurses, callous fertility police and prescient Sage priestesses. This is a matriarchal society—a ripe, sensual, emotive world where females are bossy, bitchy, weepy, nurturing, subservient, and often in a state of warm, sweet tumescence. Males are occasional visitors, arriving as drones in a cloud of Henry VIII bawdy revelry, flirting with bee wenches, getting sloppy-drunk and generally making a mess of things with spilled bodily fluids.

Flora 717, a preternaturally gifted sanitation bee, is our guide into the Hive Mind. Though ugly and besmirched by her low caste, she is strong, resourceful, and clever. Her gifts are noticed by a Sage priestess and Flora advances through the ranks of the hive until she becomes a forager, one of the true worker bees who leave the hive in search of nectar and pollen to feed her sisters.

Flora 717’s forays into the world beyond the hive are great fun. She runs into bewitching spiders, is lured into a sugar snare by wasps, nearly eaten by crows and sucked in by a carnivorous plant. Her fur coat is pummeled by rain, her wings nearly defeated by wind. She discovers the delights of gardens in full bloom and laments the poor cultivated plants that will never know the flower-bee communion of pollination and harvest.

Although rich in description and scene-setting, The Bees is thin of plot. For all the activity around her, Flora 717 is a singular character. Had she interacted with bees of a similar strong nature and evolving consciousness and embarked upon adventures that raised the stakes, there would have been more to this story. But she seems to be the only bee that can move among the ranks and the only one capable of independent thought. This, as well as her mysterious ability to produce eggs, the strange poison brought into the hive by hapless foragers, and the odd mythology of the six panels, are among the plot threads left dangling. After a while, the dancing and feeding and descriptions of how nectar and pollen and wax taste and smell and feel and elicit orgasmic reactions in the hive’s residents become filler prose, meant to round out where the story itself falls short.

In various reviews of The Bees I have read that this book is about racial identity, environmental degradation, a riff off Margaret Atwood’s classic deconstruction of fertility, The Handmaid’s Tale, a reflection of Hive Mind politics and the dangers of a totalitarian state, an allegorical tale of class and society. Oookaay. . . Nope. Really, it’s just about bees. A fantastical, rich, imaginative look into the life cycle of the amazing little bee and its vast community. I will never look at a bee again without wondering how far away she is from home and what messages she sends through her legs and spiracles, and the humming of her wings.