The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

Living in the pink house with the Boatwrights provides Lily Owens, a fourteen year old girl from Sylvan, South Carolina, with an experience like no other. As the protagonist, she gets to become a master beekeeper from the teachings of August. In the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd inserts symbolism through bees by drawing connections between the jobs of the bees in the hive and the characters of the novel. There are also other symbols that help to make the story. The bees illustrate the journey of the characters to show that a broken person will sew up their cracks of despair, just as a bee in a hive can not work unless surrounded by the fellow bees. Kidd introduces numerous characters throughout the novel from Lily to the

First off, the most important part of every colony is the queen bee. Without the queen the hive would cease to exist. The queen bee at the pink house is the Virgin Mary, more specifically the Black Madonna or the statue of The Lady of the Chains. All of the activities done around the house revolve around and are done in honor of the Black Madonna. Without her the house would not be as stable as it is. Events such as the human hive collapsing are foreshadowed when August tells Lily, “Well, if you have a queen and a group of independent-minded bees that split off from the rest of the hive and look for another place to live, then you’ve got a swarm” (Kidd 93). The independent-minded bee is May, when she goes off and drowns herself, she tries to find a better place to live. As a result, the house erupts into tears, anger, and depression. The next link is with the worker bees, who leave the hive to collect the nectar, which is later turned into honey. In the novel, the worker bees are August, Zach, and their new companion, Lily. Multiple times in the story, these three worker bees are found collecting honey, distributing honey, or working in general, much like a typical worker bee.

To start, although there is a religious meaning for her name, Lily symbolizes a flower, but there is also some relevance to bees. Mysteriously when, “[she] would watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of [her] bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making the propeller sound,” she was watching as the bees, imaginary or real, at the “high-pitched zzzzzz,” (Kidd 1) she would know that the bees are swarming in her room, she is their flower, just as her name suggests. This next part symbolizes Lily’s initiation to the life of a beekeeper from the life of an abused and neglected child. The event is the first time that Lily gets stung by a bee, while out collecting honey with August. After getting stung, Lily gives advice to the reader, which has a deeper meaning: “After getting stung, you can’t get unstung no matter how much you whine about it,” (Kidd 167). She is saying that once she changed her life, by becoming a beekeeper, she may never go back to what her life was like whether she likes it or not, a lesson for all to hear. Bees in the story symbolize many different things and are symbolized through many of the scenes and characters. For example, the calendar sisters. All three of them are different from each other. August, the eldest of the three, symbolizes the wise side of the bees, seen through many of her