“The Bees” by Lanine Paull is at once both incredibly imaginative and deeply rooted in science. It tells the story of a bee named Flora 717 living and working alongside her sisters in a hive in an orchard. She begins her life as a lowly sanitation worker, shunned and avoided by all other higher sisters in the hive. Mysteriously, she is different from her other sanitation kin because she is able to speak and is thus tested in various capacities throughout the hive. Through her experiences exploring the hive, the reader learns about the bee’s sacred religion, hierarchy, devotion, sin, and inner workings of the hive, all of which is built on true facts about bees but anthropomorphized to appeal to our human nature. The hive is a place of ritual where all activity is driven by devotion to the Queen, but as we follow Flora through her life, the reader begins to realize the hive’s cult-like ways and worry about what mysteries are hidden behind its waxy walls.

I was impressed by Paull’s use of scent, sound, touch, and hearing to describe the bee’s world. The sense of smell was the most important of these as the bees followed scent markers, transmitted their emotions through smell, and recognized each other by their scent alone. Scent became a cloak to shield unwanted emotions from other bees and a call to devotion of the Queen’s love. I found the author’s use of senses other than sight to be very well-written and enchanting. There were times, however, when the descriptions may have gotten a bit over the top, perhaps spilling into the realm of sexual without being overtly explicit. Flora described a fertile male drone demanding she groom his genitals as having a “gigantic, pulsing thorax” and “dronewood as hard as a twig” and when she foraged a newly bloomed flower in the spring, “the flower shuddered in pleasure at her touch as she thrust her tongue deep into its mouth.” See? Not sexual exactly, but evocative. In addition, mildly graphic descriptions of egg-laying and violent bee-capitations are common throughout. Colorful descriptions fill this book, which I found to enhance the reading experience, but bee warned if you are endeavoring to avoid graphic, bee-related, fetishistic imagery.

Overall, this book was a scientifically accurate and imaginative underdog story crossed with the Handmaiden’s Tale. Expect mystery, forbidden sins, and gore mixed together with adventure and oddly sexual flower kissing. You will never look at bees the same way again.

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Created Sep 01, 2019 at 1:25pm • Submit your own review...