The Bees

A Novel

By: Laline Paull

Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy

Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, a member of the lowest caste in her orchard hive, where work and sacrifice are the highest virtues and worship of the beloved Queen the only religion. But Flora is not like other bees. With circumstances threatening the hive's survival, her curiosity is regarded as a dangerous flaw, but her courage and strength are assets. She is allowed to feed the newborns in the royal nursery and then to become a forager, flying alone and free to collect nectar and pollen. A feat of bravery grants her access to the Queen's inner sanctum, where she discovers mysteries about the hive that are both profound and ominous.

But when Flora breaks the most sacred law of all - daring to challenge the Queen's preeminence - enemies abound, from the fearsome fertility police who enforce the hive's strict social hierarchy to the high priestesses jealously wedded to power. Her deepest instincts to serve and sacrifice are now overshadowed by a greater power: A fierce maternal love that will bring her into conflict with her conscience, her heart, and her society - and lead her to perform unthinkable deeds.

Thrilling, suspenseful, and spectacularly imaginative, The Bees and its dazzling young heroine will forever change the way you look at the world outside your window.

©2014 Laline Paull (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers

A captivating story

Worth the read 20 times over— this book oozes heart and has just the right amount of vivid detail. It never bogs down and manages to build a great amount of steam before a worthy ending. If you love bees, or nature, this book is highly recommended.

Really interesting perspective

Enjoyed story and really enjoyed perspective
Reminded me of scifi stories where you must trust the writer to define the world around you. Totally got inside my head. Loved it.

Bzzzzzz

I loved this book. And the story behind how it came to Bee :0)
Lookinf forward to more by this author.

Beekeeper Approved

If you're a beekeeper, this book will ring very true. Listen to it while you watch your hives. Ms. Paull really knows her stuff (with a few licenses taken). If you're not a beekeeper, this is a fairly accurate, though dramatized, depiction of hive life. Again, with some artistic licenses taken. An engaging look into the lives of our beloved pollinators. I forgive Ms. Paull for painting us beekeepers as thieves.

Wow! Surprisingly great story!

Excellent story & wonderfully narrated. Reminiscent of books like Watership Down & 1984. The Bees are the backdrop for an interesting story of a dystopian society where social order, duty & allegiance dictate the life of Flora 717 and her hive.

could not get involved with the characters.

It was a struggle for me to finish this audio book. I get distracted often during a book, and while I usually rewind to listen again, I didn't really care about what I'd missed. I will try to listen again in a year or so. I'll update my review if my opinion changes.
To each their own, but this was not for me.

I didn't expect to love this book...

But I certainly did! I learned so much, and loved that I learned these facts about bees through listening to a very entertaining story. I would definitely recommend this book.

My Favorite Book of 2014

It’s difficult to articulate just how brilliant and utterly original this book is. You really have to experience it to understand what the author is up to here. By pulling the listener inside a bee hive and tracing the seasonal lifecycle of one remarkable worker bee, Laline Paull has created a breathtaking novel with shades of dystopia and the pacing of a political thriller, demonstrating Orwellian intelligence but somehow – refreshingly - lacking the satire.

Stepping inside the microcosmic world of The Bees threw my own world into relief and made me feel –surprisingly – rather small. That this full experience of life - dramatic, messy, complicated, harrowing - is happening all around us but on a tiny scale is incredibly humbling. Despite taking place almost entirely inside a hive, the story is begins and ends with actual human characters. The beekeeper and his family seem to stand in as symbolic representatives of the human race, which has the ugly habit of finding self-referential meaning in the natural world, always assuming itself to be the center of all drama. But Paull shunts these people into the position of mere bookends to the story, and they are completely ignorant of the richness and mystery that lies in between.

Orlagh Cassidy’s performance was almost erotic, a perfect production choice. The world of the hive is totally sensual, heady with scents and flavors. Communication between the bees happens through smell, dancing, and vibrations. It’s an ornate, lush, complex, and sweet world – filled with randy – and misogynistic – male bees.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about The Bees for the last six months, and it has not yet gotten the public recognition I believe it deserves. I’m doing my best to change that every time I recommend it to a friend or colleague!

Best novel about bees ever!

What made the experience of listening to The Bees the most enjoyable?

A quirky but well-crafted novel and an excellent reading.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Only Flora, the main character, really stood out as a character. Others were types.

Any additional comments?

A very clever book. The author knows the world of bees inside and out. If you can overcome the oddness of the anthropomorphism of bees this book has interesting lessons to tell about individualism vs. collectivism, hierarchy, religion, and even the epistemology. It reminded me of Nagel's now-classic essay on what it's like to be a bat. The reader is forced to consider what it might be like to be a bee, albeit one which is a little like a Disney princess -- respectful and yearning to break free from social constraints in order to find her true place in the world.

I do not say this lightly: this book is genius.

How to describe the brilliance of this exquisite book? It is a story about order and telos, of love and rebellion, of fulfilling your purpose in life. Flora 717 was born to the lowest ranks of the strict caste society of the hive, but her individuality and spirit allow her to rise above the barriers of her birth in order to become much more. In essence, the book is about the triumph of the spirit in a world that allows no deviation, while at the same time acknowledging the poignant beauty of the natural order that governs us all. This beauty is often terrible, but it is awe-inspiring, graceful, and real.

Perhaps one of the most amazing things about this superb work is that Ms. Paull has managed to bring it all together in complete biological integrity, without deviating in the slightest from acknowledged bee science. Truly, if you want to know what it feels like to be a bee, you must experience this book. You will feel and KNOW the precise way in which the bees communicate by scent, how they are bound by a shared vision of queen's love, how they dance the locations of flowers in a meadow to an audience of other foragers (this really happens!). You will experience the frenzy of the attack on the drones, and connect to the natural pulse of the hive that governs the individual bees in all that they do. These wonders and more are here in this book, waiting to be discovered.

Mind you, I am not claiming that everything in the book is true and accurate; the author surely needed to make interpretations (for instance, we obviously do not know the degree of intelligence and emotion the bees possess). I am simply stating that here you will find no falsehoods. Not one aspect of Ms. Paull's creation is in conflict with what we know about bees, and every bit of it is plausible or at least possible. And the idea it transfers to the reader is the completely convincing certainty of being privy to the secrets of the hive. Quite simply, this book is a gateway to another world.

If the natural world interests you in the slightest, or if you just want to escape this one for a while, please listen to this book. It is incredible.