The Bees (novel)

The Bees
Author	Laline Paull
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction
Publisher	4th Estate
Publication date	2014
Publication place	United Kingdom
Pages	346
ISBN	978-0-00-755774-5

Last updated October 17, 2024

The Bees was the debut novel of Laline Paull, nominated for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.^[1]

Summary

Form and setting

The novel opens and closes with a brief frame narrative describing the human owners of an orchard on the edge of a town, in which lies the beehive of an elderly beekeeper. Otherwise, The Bees is set within the world of this hive of honeybees. It is a third-person narrative, told from the point of view of one worker bee, Flora 717.

The world of the hive is portrayed in ways which blend human and apian ways of apprehending the world. For example, the world of the hive, most of whose inhabitants are biological sisters, is conceptualised in ways that evoke a medieval Christian nunnery, with the queen bee thought of as a divine mother-figure evoking the Virgin Mary in Roman Catholicism; the small number of male drones are conceptualised as rumbunctious, ruff-wearing knights; rooms include nurseries and the Chapel of Wax; the hum of the bees in the hive is conceptualised as the Holy Chord. The bees frequently apprehend the world through scent, which the novel often describes in concrete terms (for example, "Sister Sage curled a filament of her own scent around Flora's antennae", pp. 30–31).

Hive society is divided into different kin groups with specific roles, named after flowers. For example, the Sage are priestesses, the Thistle are guardians, and the Teasel are wetnurses. Those bees who have individual personal names are also named after flowers. The kin at the bottom of the hive's social hierarchy, too despised to be named after a specific flower, are the Flora, who are viewed as ugly, smelly, unable to talk, and serve as sanitation workers, clearing the hive of debris and corpses. Bees from diverse kin may become foragers, flying away from the hive to gather food. A further social role is being a member of the "fertility police", who kill infirm or deviant bees.

A regular feature of the bees' day is "Devotion", when the Queen's scent permeates the hive, the bees hum the Holy Chord, and the sisters of the hive experience a sense of union with one another and with their Holy Mother the Queen.

Plot

The story begins with the emergence from pupation of the protagonist, Flora 717, who faces prejudice and abuse throughout the story on account of her despised status. She is, however, larger and darker than most Flora, and born able to speak. For these reasons, the fertility police plan to kill her, but a cold and rainy summer has left the hive short-handed, and the priestess Sister Sage intervenes to save the talented heroine. Sister Sage sets Flora 717 to work in the nursery, feeding royal jelly (referred to by the bees as "flow") to the larvae. There Flora witnesses the fertility police destroying eggs laid by any bee other than the Queen, as well as any bee suspected of laying those eggs. Refusing to co-operate with the fertility police, Flora is threatened with execution but again saved by Sister Sage, who sends her to work in Sanitation. In this role, Flora encounters various areas of the hive (such as the Fanning Hall, where nectar is reduced into honey) and sections of hive society (such as the drones, who are entitled, demanding, adored by the sisters, and given to sexual harassment; Flora narrowly avoids being raped). Flora's work as a corpse-bearer takes her out of the hive for the first time.

Flora takes a central role in killing an attacking wasp and is rewarded with an audience with the Queen. The Queen's ladies in waiting take Flora to the Holy Library, a hexagonal chamber the scents of whose walls contain six key chapters in the collective memory of the hive. Flora gets to read its scent panels, learning of predators outside the hive, "the Kindness" (the practice of killing infirm, deviant, or elderly bees), what the reader recognises as the robbery of honey by humans, and other phenomena which she struggles to comprehend. Flora learns that the Queen is not in good health, before being chased away by the ladies in waiting.

Hurt by her separation from the Queen and finding herself unable to participate in Devotion, Flora aspires to become a forager. Before she does, disaster strikes the foragers when they collect pollen from a field of rape that has been doused with pesticide, bringing illness and polluted food into the hive. The venerable forager Lily 500, who had signalled this food source to other foragers before the pesticide was sprayed, is unfairly killed by the fertility police, but before her death she is able to transmit her store of foraging data to Flora.

At this point, the story begins to alternate between two aspects of Flora's life. To her own surprise, Flora lays an egg, experiencing maternal affection despite knowing that it is forbidden; this is followed later in the book by a second and then a third egg. One thread of the narrative therefore concerns Flora's efforts to bring an offspring to pupation. Flora tries to enable the birth of her first offspring by sneaking the egg into the nursery. This is found and destroyed by the fertility police, and Flora witnesses another bee being killed on suspicion of laying it. Learning to make beeswax to form a cradle, she finds a hidden place in which to lay her second egg, but it is destroyed when the hive's human cultivator intrudes at the end of the season to remove honeycomb.

Shortly after laying her first egg, Flora is required to become a forager due to the poor summer, the loss of foragers to pesticide, and her acquisition of Lily 500's data. The second thread of the narrative, then, concerns Flora's foraging expeditions. She is very successful and frequently shows other foragers how to find food by performing waggle dances. Flora's foraging expeditions see her fleeing crows, escaping a trap laid by wasps, colliding with a mobile phone mast, receiving prophetic wisdom from spiders, and exploring a conservatory.

As winter closes in, the sister bees, following the instructions of the Hive Mind, slaughter those drones that have not successfully mated outside the hive and then form a winter cluster. Flora discovers that the least obnoxious drone, Sir Linden, has survived the cull, injured, and enables him to hide in the cluster and survive. The cluster is briefly disturbed by the incursion of a mouse, which the bees kill and embalm in propolis.

As winter goes on, evidence that the Queen is seriously ill grows, and as spring begins Flora identifies that the Queen is a source of sickness in the hive. The fertility police have a Thistle execute the Queen, and the hive moves into a period of internal strife. Flora lays her third egg and this time successfully hides it and brings it to pupation. Sister Sage realises that Flora has given birth, but Flora kills her, disposing of the body with the help of Sir Linden.

As the disorder in the hive grows, several "princesses" (virgin queens) are born to different kin and begin to fight to the death. A Sage princess is winning until Flora's child, who turns out also to be a princess, emerges and kills her to become the new Queen. Immediately after, the hive faces an unstoppable attack by wasps, and Flora helps her daughter lead the colony in a swarm; her daughter mates with Sir Linden; and they find a new home, in a hollow in a beech tree. Flora's life implicitly ends at this point.

Scientific background

An author's note at the end of the novel indicates that Flora's reproduction is inspired by parthenogenetic reproduction in Apis mellifera scutellata worker bees.^[2]^: 346 In an interview, Paull commented that

I found out about the 1 in 10,000 rarity of the sterile female worker, who will spontaneously begin forming eggs in her body, to the consternation of certain of her sisters, who even biologists refer to as "the fertility police". These real squads of bees will search for the laying worker, hunt her down and kill her, and eat her eggs. This is real biology, and really scary to imagine. And then there's the brutal phenomenon of how the princesses will seek each other out and fight to the death until only one is left alive to rule and be queen. Life behind those beehive walls is really stranger than anything I could imagine — so I just rushed to write the story. [...] I learned that being wild in your narrative means your story flounders. So I made the decision to stick to the truth of the organism, wherever I could. And that led me to the best story I could write, because it was steeled with fact.^[3]

Reviews

Reviews were published, inter alia, in the New York Times,^[4]Daily Telegraph,^[5]Sunday Times, Locus, Daily Mail, Guardian,^[6]Times, Vogue, Tatler, Kirkus, Washington Post, and USA Today.^[2]^: i–iv

Related Research Articles

A honey bee is a eusocial flying insect within the genus Apis of the bee clade, all native to mainland Afro-Eurasia. After bees spread naturally throughout Africa and Eurasia, humans became responsible for the current cosmopolitan distribution of honey bees, introducing multiple subspecies into South America, North America, and Australia.

Beekeeping is the maintenance of bee colonies, commonly in artificial beehives. Honey bees in the genus Apis are the most commonly kept species but other honey producing bees such as Melipona stingless bees are also kept. Beekeepers keep bees to collect honey and other products of the hive: beeswax, propolis, bee pollen, and royal jelly. Other sources of beekeeping income include pollination of crops, raising queens, and production of package bees for sale. Bee hives are kept in an apiary or "bee yard".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Honey bee life cycle</span> Life cycle of Apis mellifera

The honey bee life cycle, here referring exclusively to the domesticated Western honey bee, depends greatly on their social structure.

A queen bee is typically an adult, mated female (gyne) that lives in a colony or hive of honey bees. With fully developed reproductive organs, the queen is usually the mother of most, if not all, of the bees in the beehive. Queens are developed from larvae selected by worker bees and specially fed in order to become sexually mature. There is normally only one adult, mated queen in a hive, in which case the bees will usually follow and fiercely protect her.

A worker bee is any female bee that lacks the reproductive capacity of the colony's queen bee and carries out the majority of tasks needed for the functioning of the hive. While worker bees are present in all eusocial bee species, the term is rarely used for bees other than honey bees, particularly the European honey bee. Worker bees of this variety are responsible for approximately 80% of the world's crop pollination services.

A drone is a male bee. Unlike the female worker bee, a drone has no stinger. He does not gather nectar or pollen and cannot feed without assistance from worker bees. His only role is to mate with a maiden queen in nuptial flight.

Hive management in beekeeping refers to intervention techniques that a beekeeper may perform to ensure hive survival and to maximize hive production. Hive management techniques vary widely depending on the objectives.

This page is a glossary of beekeeping.

Bombus terrestris, the buff-tailed bumblebee or large earth bumblebee, is one of the most numerous bumblebee species in Europe. It is one of the main species used in greenhouse pollination, and so can be found in many countries and areas where it is not native, such as Tasmania. Moreover, it is a eusocial insect with an overlap of generations, a division of labour, and cooperative brood care. The queen is monogamous which means she mates with only one male. B. terrestris workers learn flower colours and forage efficiently.

The dwarf honey bee, Apis florea, is one of two species of small, wild honey bees of southern and southeastern Asia. It has a much wider distribution than its sister species, Apis andreniformis. First identified in the late 18th century, Apis florea is unique for its morphology, foraging behavior and defensive mechanisms like making a piping noise. Apis florea have open nests and small colonies, which makes them more susceptible to predation than cavity nesters with large numbers of defensive workers. These honey bees are important pollinators and therefore commodified in countries like Cambodia.

The Cape honey bee or Cape bee is a southern South African subspecies of the western honey bee. They play a major role in South African agriculture and the economy of the Western Cape by pollinating crops and producing honey in the Western Cape region of South Africa. The species is endemic to the Western Cape region of South Africa on the coastal side of the Cape Fold mountain range.

Haplodiploidy is a sex-determination system in which males develop from unfertilized eggs and are haploid, and females develop from fertilized eggs and are diploid. Haplodiploidy is sometimes called arrhenotoky.

Apis andreniformis, or the black dwarf honey bee, is a relatively rare species of honey bee whose native habitat is the tropical and subtropical regions of Southeast Asia.

The western honey bee or European honey bee is the most common of the 7–12 species of honey bees worldwide. The genus name Apis is Latin for 'bee', and mellifera is the Latin for 'honey-bearing' or 'honey-carrying', referring to the species' production of honey.

Bombus bohemicus, also known as the gypsy's cuckoo bumblebee, is a species of socially parasitic cuckoo bumblebee found in most of Europe with the exception of the southern Iberian Peninsula and Iceland. B. bohemicus practices inquilinism, or brood parasitism, of other bumblebee species. B. bohemicus is a generalist parasite, successfully invading several species from genus Bombus. The invading queen mimics the host nest's chemical signals, allowing her to assume a reproductively dominant role as well as manipulation of host worker fertility and behavior.

Apis cerana, the eastern honey bee, Asiatic honey bee or Asian honey bee, is a species of honey bee native to South, Southeast and East Asia. This species is the sister species of Apis koschevnikovi and both are in the same subgenus as the western (European) honey bee, Apis mellifera. A. cerana is known to live sympatrically along with Apis koschevnikovi within the same geographic location. Apis cerana colonies are known for building nests consisting of multiple combs in cavities containing a small entrance, presumably for defense against invasion by individuals of another nest. The diet of this honey bee species consists mostly of pollen and nectar, or honey. Moreover, Apis cerana is known for its highly social behavior, reflective of its classification as a type of honey bee.

Worker policing is a behavior seen in colonies of social hymenopterans whereby worker females eat or remove eggs that have been laid by other workers rather than those laid by a queen. Worker policing ensures that the offspring of the queen will predominate in the group. In certain species of bees, ants and wasps, workers or the queen may also act aggressively towards fertile workers. Worker policing has been suggested as a form of coercion to promote the evolution of altruistic behavior in eusocial insect societies.

Scaptotrigona postica is a species of stingless bee that lives mainly in Brazil. It is a eusocial bee in the tribe Meliponini. S. postica is one of 25 species in the genus Scaptotrigona and is a critical pollinator of the tropical rain forests of Brazil. They construct their nests in hollowed sections of tree trunks, allowing for effective guarding at the nest entrance. This species shows colony structure similar to most members of the Meliponini tribe with three roles within the colony: queen, worker, and male. S. postica individuals have different forms of communication from cuticular hydrocarbons to pheromones and scent trails. Communication is especially useful during worker foraging for nectar and pollen through the Brazilian tropical rain forests. S. postica is a very important pollinator of the Brazilian tropical rain forests and is widely appreciated for its honey. Stingless bees account for approximately 30% of all pollination of the Brazilian Caatinga and Pantanal ecosystems and up to 90% of the pollination for many species of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and the Amazon.

Melipona scutellaris is a eusocial stingless bee species of the order Hymenoptera and the genus Melipona. It is considered to be the reared Melipona species with the largest distribution in the North and Northeast regions of Brazil, with records from Rio Grande do Norte down to Bahia. Its common name, Uruçu, comes from the Tupi "eiru su", which in this indigenous language means "big bee". Their honey is highly desirable and the materials they create for nests have been proven to be a promising source of antibiofilm agents and to present selectivity against human cancer cell lines at low concentrations compared to normal cells.

References

↑ Clark, Nick (2015-04-13). "Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015: The Bees by Laline Paull creates a buzz on the shortlist | News | Culture". The Independent . Retrieved 2016-04-21.
1 2 Paull, Laline (2014). The Bees. London: 4th Estate. ISBN 978-0-00-755774-5..
↑ Misra, Ria (September 24, 2014). "How Laline Paull Brought Real Science into Her Novel The Bees". Io9.gizmodo.com. Archived from the original on 11 April 2021. Retrieved 2016-04-21.
↑ Straub, Emma (23 May 2014). "Sunday Book Review : Hive Mentality : The Bees by Laline Paull". The New York Times . Retrieved 2016-04-21.
↑ Scott, Catherine (2014-06-11). "The Bees by Laline Paull, review: 'ambitious and beautiful'". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 2016-04-21.
↑ Jones, Gwyneth (21 May 2014). "The Bees by Laline Paull review – a fantasy with a sting in its tail | Books". The Guardian . Retrieved 2016-04-21.

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[1] Clark, Nick (2015-04-13). "Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015: The Bees by Laline Paull creates a buzz on the shortlist | News | Culture". The Independent . Retrieved 2016-04-21.

[:11-2] 1 2 Paull, Laline (2014). The Bees. London: 4th Estate. ISBN 978-0-00-755774-5..

[3] Misra, Ria (September 24, 2014). "How Laline Paull Brought Real Science into Her Novel The Bees". Io9.gizmodo.com. Archived from the original on 11 April 2021. Retrieved 2016-04-21.

[4] Straub, Emma (23 May 2014). "Sunday Book Review : Hive Mentality : The Bees by Laline Paull". The New York Times . Retrieved 2016-04-21.

[5] Scott, Catherine (2014-06-11). "The Bees by Laline Paull, review: 'ambitious and beautiful'". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 2016-04-21.

[6] Jones, Gwyneth (21 May 2014). "The Bees by Laline Paull review – a fantasy with a sting in its tail | Books". The Guardian . Retrieved 2016-04-21.

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