Imagine bees flying gently around their hives, bringing nectar back from the outside world, caring for their queen and each other, and creating the honey that we often take for granted. What do bees represent to the world? These little creatures have long been recognized as hard-working, determined insects, but they can also represent other things. In her fiction novel The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd uses the motif of bees to mark changes in Lily’s life and motivation to love and forgive.
For example, a swarm of bees visits Lily one night in her room in Sylvan. The bees surrounded her but did not bother to sting her. “Looking back on it now,” Lily says, “I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary” (Kidd 2). According to the passage, the bees were a foretelling of the changes her life was about to undergo. Furthermore, in the store in Tiburon, Lily ponders over this while looking at the jars of Black Madonna
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For example, while teaching Lily how to behave around her bees, August explains how to avoid getting stung and ends with “Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved” as well as reminding Lily that “the world was really one big bee yard, and the same rules worked fine in both places” (Kidd 92). Here, August and the bees teach Lily to love other people, even when the people could potentially hurt her. Lily uses this lesson later, after she learns about her mother. “I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again” (Kidd 301). Even after everything that she and her mother have done to each other, Lily still forgives them both. Working with the bees taught Lily to be kind and gentle, to love the world and forgive