Brought forth for one reason and one reason just, to secure both home and mother, regardless of whether it implies your life is lost all the while. This is a honey bee's world; serious, organized, and perhaps a bit of discouraging. Honey bees are utilized all through Sue Monk Kidd's tale 'The Secret Life of Bees' as imagery for how Lily associates with society, her family/companions, and herself. As Lily, the storyteller/hero develops and develops into a lady, there are numerous models and references to how honey bees are indistinguishable to how we, as people, match and work altogether; or by and large, don't.Lily’s family/community is the beehive, her mother is the queen, and she is a worker, plus many more correlations between these tiny black and yellow honey-makers and us.
One major similarity between bees and humans is a queen and a mother. “The queen . . . is the unifying force of the community” and if absent for a few hours, “[bees] show unmistakable signs of queenlessness. ”(1) When Lily’s mother died, Lily was noticeably different, motherless, queenless.She didn’t have someone to fix her “hair that stuck out in eleven different directions,”(3) or to “. . . ake trails of graham cracker crumbs and marshmallows to lure roaches outside,”(172) instead of killing them. “You can tell which girls lack mothers” just like you can tell a which bee colony lacks a queen. Lily is easily spotted and labeled as “off” by peers and society because of her noticeable physical and social shortfalls in the way of being an average teenage girl. “The queen [produces] some substance that . . . stimulates the normal working behavior in the hive. [This] has been called ‘queen substance. ’”(102) Lily’s box of her mother’s possessions is her version of “queen substance. Whenever she’s feeling like she is unable to go on and withstand the abuse from T. Ray, she just holds her mother’s things, bathed in the “mother substance” they give off. “A queenless colony is a pitiful and melancholy community… Without intervention, the colony will die. But introduce a new queen and the most extravagant change takes place. ”(277) When Lily found out from August that her mother had left her, she was crestfallen and despondent. Her mother was gone and gone for good, Lily just was scared to let her go. This revelation caused her to recognize that she didn’t need to continue clinging to her old queen’s image, but instead turn to the present and her new queen. Actually, her new queens, for she had a handful of women in her life that were able to step up to fill this important role.
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These women are August, June, and Rosaleen. Without them, Lily can barely function, but with them, she flourishes. After Rosaleen is beaten by the police and racists, and T. Ray says that Lily’s mother left her (she doesn’t believe it), Lily thinks of the bees she had trapped in a jar. When she had opened the jar to let them go, they hadn’t left. She hears a little voice in her head whispering, “Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open. ”(41) This is her realization that she is free to leave, to escape all of the horrible treatment and find a home, a place where she belongs. “On leaving the old nest, the swarm normally flies only a few meters and settles. ”(34) Lily runs away from home with Rosaleen to Tiburon, South Carolina to escape the corrupt police, dangerous racists, and T. Ray in her hometown.
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