Beatrice The Bees: A Narrative Fiction

Nurse bees have a gift for nurturing, and they always feed and care for all the baby bees. August depicts all of these aspects in her every day actions. She was once even a maid who raised a small girl, Deborah Fontanel, to womanhood. August is also a big sister, so she has the inclination to nurture and care for May and June whenever they need her. Nurse bees are substitute mothers to all the baby bees in the hive. August is similar to them in that way as well because she acts as a substitute mother to Lily since Lily's mother is dead. August also has the obligation, as a beekeeper, to take care of all the bees in all the hives that she controls. She has to keep them cool in the summer and carefully keep the whole bee society running smoothly. The queens have to be healthy, the workers have to do their jobs, and none of this would happen without August taking care of everything. A nurse bee is the most self-sacrificing bee of all. They give up their freedom to take care of others. When it came to the color of the house, August even said, “Well this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like

The presence of a bee generally scares people. So they swat at it, which makes the bee angry and defensive, which causes the bee to sting. Once the bee stings someone, it dies. Most people might think their death is a good thing. Unfortunately, various species of bees have been added to the endangered species list (Kennedy). Bees pollinate about 70% of the crops used by 90% of the world (What Would Happen) and as of February 2017, 10 million bees have died since 2010 ( Bennett). Bees need to be saved to ensure the Earth’s survival, along with our own.

“People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.” Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bees, highlights this theme in her work. In the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, the horrendous events that Lily Owens encounters in her young life are necessary in her journey to adulthood as she develops into a strong, resilient, loving, forgiving young woman. The result of Lily’s mom dying when Lily was only four years old, T. Ray abusing Lily day in and day out, and Lily experiencing racism first hand, have all been a big part of Lily’s young life and have shaped her into the person she is today.

August’s home mirrors a beehive. Just like every beehive, Augusts home also has a queen bee. August says that Black Mary is the mother of all the women in her household. Lily is encompassed by a strong sense of feminism in the beehive. This inspires Lily to become a strong independent woman like August. Choosing not to marry, August also helps Lily realize that you do not need another person to support you. Just like a beehive, the bees preform rituals that keep their members healthy. When May committed suicide, August preformed rituals to help her with her grief. The actual beehives surrounding the bee farm are especially important to Lily because by the

The article “Hivey Leaguers” discusses problems affecting the bee population in the United States ranging from chemicals and insecticides to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Colony Collapse Disorder occurs when the worker bees disappear from the hives, leaving behind the queen and the nurses to take care of the immature bees. This newly discovered threat to bee populations caused widespread panic in the entomologist community and lead to a race to find the cause, and the relative cure. Though this new disorder was a danger, the real bane of the bees was a much more sinister, and domestic, threat.

“Lets imagine for a moment that we are tiny enough to follow a bee into a hive. Usually the first thing we would have to ge used to is the darkness”(Kidd 82). The bee is an insect that spends all day working: working to create a home, working to spread pollen and working to create honey. A bee's life and the society of bees can be closely related to the life of humans. In the novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, the author conveys her lessons about human life through the imagery of bees.

The bees believed that a communist society where they owned their own means of production would be a better life for them, but as Montgomery, the humans lawyer lost the trial he warned Barry that ‘a negative shift in the balance of nature is imminent’. As it turned out, the immense amass of honey put every bee out of a job, including the vitally important Pollen Jocks and Barry’s best friend Adam. Barry now believes he lives in an ideal world where no one has to work for anything ‘I don’t understand why they aren’t happy! We have so much now’ (Benson, Bee Movie 2007). The bees realised that living in the communist society was not the ideology they had wanted, now the bees didn’t need to make honey they had no work to do, this put bee kind in jeopardy as without bees making honey they was no pollination so the flowers were dying

They lay eggs and basically control the whole swarm. It shows the power of female community. I think that this relates to the book because the protagonist is a female and her actions show that Lily is a strong character, like a queen bee.

A beekeeper is a person who keeps and raises honey bees to harvest the honey for product to sell. Traditionally, beekeepers tend to be men for the consequences that come with the practice such as consist stings and the messy job of collecting and purifying the honey. But, in the novel, August is portrayed as the best beekeeper around. “Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. It comes from years of loving children and husbands” (80). She takes on the career of a man and becomes distinguished from the rest because of her excellence in her career. The Boatwright’s believed that “women made the best beekeepers 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting” (143). August not only practices the art of beekeeping, she also is the head preacher, a minister of sorts, in the Daughters of Mary church that she started. An organization that helps each other, has fun together, worship together, and stand powerful to any force that tries to deter their beliefs. They bring a sense of empowerment to Lily as she grows older. Lily, on the other hand, is taught to be the victim by her father. She has no real role models to encourage her. Her teacher tries to

1. Considering the title, it's no surprise that bees are a fundamental part of this novel. I like to think that in the beginning of the novel, when Lily captures a bee in the jar, the bee represents her mother, Deborah. Later in the novel, we learn that Deborah falls in love with T-Ray, which could be the part where the jar traps the bee inside. When Lily opens the jar so the bee could leave, the bee doesn't, which could represent Deborah when she could have left T-Ray but she didn't because she was pregnant. When the bees finally left the jar, it represents how Deborah finally escapes and ran off to Tiburon. Of course, this is not the only reason the bees are important in the novel. When Lily runs away from home with Rosaleen, they come

The title of this book is so significant knowing that the bees relate to all things in the story. The secret life of bees, is directed to the life that Lily did not realize she had. The bees signify the relation to all the people who helped Lily get to where she found who she was. The author wanted to convey a obscure perspective of life and that there many be more to life than you think. Reading this story can change you perspective of the title after getting to know the characters and what they had achieved in the story.

Not everyone in the world has a perfect family and may experience certain events in childhood that can affect the way they see and how they display themselves. Motherless Lily lives unhappily with her emotionally detached father, who claims that as a child, Lily accidently killed her mother. “It was you who did it, Lily. You didn’t mean it, but it was you” (299). After hearing this and helping break her only friend and black caretaker, Rosaleen out of jail, the two runaway to a place where Lily suspects her mother once spent time. While on this journey, Lily must find out the truth and come to terms of who her mother really was, and to help understand her own life.

The sun shimmered brightly in the morning sky, sending rays of warmth on to the land below it. Birds started to chirp and the bees started to buzz. The bees began their work in the golden, honey-filled hive. Most of them flew out, wandering around looking for blooming flowers, to get sweet nectar. Other bees nursed the young, took part in the building the impressive hive piece by piece, or guarded their home. Everyday, the bees are making their colony stronger...but what does this mean? Each bee has a significant role in the hive, and a bee does its job so every bee in the hive survives. In other words, a beehive would not exist if the bees did not work together as a whole. The way a community of bees works is not only fascinating, but also similar to the human world. Sue Monk Kidd incorporates various concepts in The Secret Life of Bees, and uses bees to develop the significance of those concepts. Kidd makes connections between bees and how they represent

When Lawrence and Little Bee converse alone for the first time, Little Bee tells Lawrence that she is “only staying here to help her (Sarah)” (pg 185). At first, one would believe that Little Bee went to Sarah’s house because Sarah saves Little Bee’s life and so Little Bee feels gratitude towards her. Also, Sarah is the only person she had contact with in Britain. However, if one allows themselves to increase their analytical thinking, they are able to discover Little Bee’s reason, after leaving Andrew dead, as to why she wants to stay at Sarah’s house .

She is attempting to escape the destruction in Nigeria, but encounters more in England. By escaping, she frees herself from the people overthrowing her community and who kill her family. She escapes the place but struggles to escape the effects, and grants others power over her mind. Living in fear and struggling to live at peace, Little Bee struggles to survive. As a refugee, Little Bee resides in a dehumanizing detention center, where her damaged mind worsens. She continuously thinks about what she will do if the “men”, the guards, return. Consequently, Little Bee has recurring suicidal thoughts: “[...]whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready[…] I worked out how to kill myself in every single one of the situations a girl like me might get into in the detention center” (Little 47). Her past is so damaging that Little Bee finds it difficult to live her life. She plots her suicide if she ever encounters the guards again because of their actions in Nigeria. The destruction to her home and the violence of authority figures mentally disturbs Little Bee, and causes her to be cautious about everything she says and does. Refugees all over face mental destruction and similar hardships as Little