The Music of Bees

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Chapters 21-26

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Restoring Mental Health and Creating Community

Content Warning: This section discusses mental health conditions.

Mental health issues are central to the novel. Jake has depression, Harry experiences social anxiety, and Alice has panic attacks. They’re all, in their own way, isolated figures. Alice keeps to herself and doesn’t much like other people. She describes herself several times as “Alice Island” (139), which her mother once teasingly called her. Most of the time, she likes being alone: “The phrase ‘communal living’ made her skin crawl. Ever since she was a little kid, she had enjoyed her solitude” (68). Now she experiences panic attacks stemming from the death of her husband, and all is not well with her: “She was alone in the world. Alice Island, drawbridge up. Alice All Alone” (179). She tries to hide from public view the reality that she “[is] made of a million tiny broken pieces held together by cookies, solitary driving, and the sheer determination not to go crazy in public” (141). She must find a solution. The solution emerges partly through the help of her therapist, Dr. Zimmerman, and partly through a series of chance events that bring her into contact with Jake and then Harry and enable her to overcome her reclusiveness and create a little community for herself at her farm. By the end of the novel, she has “grown to care for this funny boy and the other one too—nervous Harry. Alice Holtzman [doesn’t] like very many people. But she realize[s] now that she love[s] them—these two slightly lost boys who ha[ve] come to feel like stray nephews” (281-82).

Likewise, Jake is isolated, not because he’s a loner by temperament but because he recently became paralyzed and has yet to adapt to his new situation. His life at home is difficult because his father is emotionally abusive, so there’s no sense of community there, although his mother does her best. Given the adversity he faces, he can’t stop himself from falling into depression and isolating himself from former friends. His chance meeting with Alice and his fascination with the bees set him on a course for a happier life in which he connects easily with people again. Alice and Jake, living and working on the same farm, attain a sense of community and common purpose that the bees instinctively possess. Toward the end of the novel, Jake tells Harry that there are some things he likes better than his former life: “I like myself better,” he says, and “I like other people more” (268).

Harry, a rootless individual with a prison record, recently moved out west. When the uncle he has been staying with dies, Harry is almost entirely alone in life, and given his anxiety in social situations, he has difficulty making new connections. However, he gradually discovers a sense of well-being not only through finding a job that suits his skills but also through making friends, including Jake, Yogi, and Alice. When he drives off in the SupraGro pesticide truck at the protest march, he does it for his friends, motivated by “love” (296). Finally, when he’s enjoying himself teaching kiteboarding in Texas, he looks forward to returning to Alice’s farm in Oregon, “where his friends wait[], where the bees [fly], where the wind [sings] him to sleep, and all of it call[s] him home” (320). Appropriately for this novel about building community, “home” is the final word.

Environmental Activism and Personal Responsibility

The need for environmental activism is stressed throughout the novel as characters push back against Cascadia Pacific and SupraGro, corporate giants who place profit above the health of the natural world. The topic becomes personal for Alice when she finds out that her own bees are dying and attributes this to pesticide drift from her neighbor’s orchard. Stan then asserts at a beekeepers’ meeting that SupraGro’s products are devastating bee populations across the western US. He presents scientific evidence showing that this decline in the number of bees results in a 45% drop in fruit production due to the lack of pollinators. The novel stresses that scientific data is on the side of the protestors, lending their arguments the backing of logic. By contrast, the data cited by the villains was funded by the companies themselves, placing the veracity of their data in doubt, while the data of the protestors is undoubtable. The battle over scientific data in the novel reflects real-world tendencies of industries known to pollute or harm the environment financing studies that paint them in the best light possible.

Of the three main characters, Alice is the one who leads the environmental fight, although Jake and Harry support her and join the protest march. Alice feels a sense of personal responsibility in the matter. She believes that she must stand up for what’s right, regardless of the powerful corporate forces, as well as compliant local government, lined up against her cause. She refuses to stand idly by while her precious bees come under threat. Now is the time to act. She asserts herself at the beekeepers’ meeting, informing people about the facts surrounding pesticide use. Then, at the beginning of the march, when Stan announces that they could be arrested for blocking the road, Alice reacts with firm purpose: “She stood up straighter. She was sure of this thing. It made more sense than anything had all year” (291).

Alice may feel a personal responsibility to act, but for action to be effective, it must be a concerted, collective effort. The novel uses metaphor to compare the need for collective action to the lives of the bees. Like honeybees, which “can flourish only when associated in large numbers, in a colony” (204), an organized, coordinated group is necessary; one person alone can’t do much. The novel makes this point clearly in the list of organizations that join the march to stop the delivery of SupraGro pesticides. It comprises a wide range of local groups: the Watershed Alliance, Clean Air Alliance, Mexican American Workers Union, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, La Clínica del Cariño, and the Hood River County Beekeeping Association, as well as students from Portland State University.

The environmental activists don’t gain a clear, decisive victory, though they do make progress. A year after the protest, county commissioners are considering banning some pesticides in the orchards and limiting the use of others. This muted ending realistically presents how slowly government moves and the fact that environmental protection involves a long, arduous process in which success isn’t guaranteed.

Beauty and the Bees

As the novel traces the lives of its three principal characters, the many thousands of bees in Alice’s hives form a constant backdrop for the human stories, almost as if they’re collectively a character too. The novel explains the lives of bees through chapter epigraphs, the narrator’s comments, Alice’s explanations to Jake, and Jake’s own discoveries of the intricate patterns and beauties of bee life. As for Alice, she “love[s] the story of the bees, which [is] like a fairy tale. Even if you [are] a scientist or a religious person, there [is] no denying that the bees ha[ve] real magic” (58).

When Jake immediately shows interest in them—even when he’s sitting in the road, having fallen from his wheelchair—Alice gives him a primer on the bee community. A hive of 60,000 honeybees, she explains, has only one queen, and 97% of the bees in the hive are her daughters, known as worker bees. The small remainder is made up of male bees known as drones. The bees recognize the queen by her scent. Alice elaborates on the worker bees, who after hatching take care of the baby bees and then work their way up in importance, “moving toward the front door to receive nectar and pollen from the bees that [fly] around collecting out in the field; those [are] called foragers” (58). Some of the worker bees become guard bees, the job of which is to ensure that only bees that belong to the hive are allowed entrance.

For Alice, bees are both a delightful hobby and a business since she sells the honey they produce. She enjoys the challenges that a beekeeper must deal with:

Each hive was a living organism with different needs. The bees fascinated her, these single-minded creatures that each worked tirelessly for the whole. And they created such beauty—the honey stores, yes, but also the wax foundation and the brilliant caches of pollen, which ranged in color from lemon to pumpkin to ruby (67).

Jake is also “simply overwhelmed by the beauty” of the beehive, marveling at “the living tapestry of gold, ochre, and scarlet” (110-11). He keeps coming back to this beauty: “He was fascinated by their industry, their beauty, and the mystery of the queen’s music” (183). When he’s discouraged at his physical limitations, “[h]e remember[s] the sound he ha[s] heard and the beauty he ha[s] seen,” and he reflects on “[t]his new thing, this wonder” (153). It’s almost as if the bees themselves possess the power to bless. The beauty of the bees remains a powerful motif of the importance of the natural world throughout the novel, as well as a reminder of the necessity of communal-oriented living.