Sylvia Plath: A Queen Bee's World

Image by Andre Ramos

 

Remember this: The queen bee's world is one moment of terrible limited splendor circumscribed by sacrifice.

As I had previously mentioned, there was a swarm of bees nestled on a t-post beside an old chicken coop on the property. They were very loud. Surrounding the property were several fields planted in wheat and canola. The canola grew out with bright yellow flowers atop the plant much like a wild mustard. Since this crop has been planted, I have seen all manner of bird and beast. I decided to help these bees out because the birds were flying above the field picking them and anything else off. I left them alone then went about the business of getting myself a wooden bee hive. A local man, who raised bees but didn't have any, sold me a used box in good condition for ten dollars. Which used, the box hives are eighty seven dollars. I cleaned the cedar box with disinfectant, dried the box then varnished the outside to keep the rot off the wood. I could already see there were remnants from bugs past. I didn't want to spread a disease. I wasn't sure if the bees would like this as their home because they seemed pretty annoyed when someone with white went near them. I thought it was funny how beekeepers look like the government when extraterrestrial clean-up in movies are required. That's right. Fox Mulder has the four one one on the guys in white; stealing the honey. Two episodes of the X-Files were Zero Sum and Herrenvolk with the virus-carrying bees. I pondered on when bees attack.

I bought some black netting from the grocery store and covered my head and wore cattle gloves. I picked up this yellow jug off the ground they migrated into and put it inside of the cedar bee box. I then did a little research and fixed a sugar board onto one of the cedar racks. I didn't put a sugar board in this new pine wood box I built as of yet, so the bees moved to the one with the sugar board. They were humming along then silence. I thought I had killed them but they were happy as clams in mud. I have never seen a honeycomb produced so fast. It looks like a white fossil. I was amazed. I had never seen bees doing their work before except in a video. After moving the second lot, I wondered after they took up residence in the cedar box if the queen could be found. I was worried I had done her in. I read you can shock bees by over-handling them which I wasn't doing.

This morning I went out while it was cool. I picked up the top box which is a cardboard box with hole handles in it. I looked inside and spied on them. Not one of them attacked me. I looked down and there she was right in the middle with her back-end into the amber colored gel doing her business. I laughed, took a photo for a happy moment then covered them back up to eat, drink, and be merry. I figured I would just leave them alone and keep water close by. The waterer I used is a chick waterer with pea stones around the outside. I looked at the online versions but after peeling pears outside and having honey bees, wasps, and yellow jacks suck the juice off my hands, I decided it would be easier for them to land on rocks then suck up the water. You just don't want them to drown. These bees had also got between some tobacco barns. I put the box hives up on a table then covered them with an huge beach umbrella so they would not be in direct sunlight. I was jealous and wished someone would care for me like that. I love bugs.

My plans right now are to keep the bees happy and let them reproduce because a lot of bees die from misadventure. This was one of my goals in life. I wanted some bees and here they came swarming near the sweet potatoes. Its a sign....or a swarm. Who cares? I got bees that are free to go at any time. I am not holding them captive.

I thought what could I offer up as some interesting reading aside from the how-to books. Before the bees came I checked out some reading material from the library. This one particular work was based on Plath's poems on beekeeping. 

We all know Plath commits suicide. She was a very troubled woman. Plath was very adept at using situations of the female to impress upon females thoughts, insights and ideas in her confessional style of poetry. She takes a condition that exists in nature then applies this condition to her life; she is a form of queen bee who seeks release in eventual death after laboring under the watchful eyes of others to some end. If Plath could have transcended past the confines of the intangible boundaries she and other people put around her, she might have lived but when others are holding you down at their whim with little care for the damage they are doing you it is no wonder she killed herself. People are cruel and feel justified in their cruelty because they are looking down or controlling another while they would not want that done to them. Cruelty aside, there are people that just do not question the way things just are. It is accepted much like a man going to his beheading without hope of rescue. Worse yet, with troubled souls the thoughts they think kill them just as fast without anyone's help.

Sylvia Plath wrote about five or six poems on the keeping of bees. Each one is an evaluation of self contained governance inside of a hive, the behavior and thoughts of the speaker where the inner drama is going on.

Plath explores the power order inside the hive. When comparing psychologist David Holbrook's claim about Plath: “Be(e)ing seems a threat to one who doesn't know how to be.”

I would wonder if he believed that Plath was so controlled by constant brainwashing of her role as a female in society that when she butted up against the real her, she was beside herself with confusion and frustration for not being able to move to the plane of existence that was meant for her; instead of the one dictated to her by the era she lived in. She had already superseded in her mind and severed herself away from the mundane life she dwelled in but her mind couldn't consolidate the fact the mind was freer than the actual physical body.

Much like the queen; pregnant with offspring's ideas and these products being put in small circular cells for safekeeping until ready. Yet she is isolated between births as its a never-ending cycle of giving life while she slowly dies. Plath could have been trapped in her own attic while she held a key. She could be locked inside her own mind with the key within reach but yet stares off blankly into an unknown distance; still incarcerated by her own unwillingness to push open the lower door and walk out. This could be the problem with Plath.

The queen must suffer a unique regal motherhood. Plath's motherhood was her poetry and her suffering stemmed from the isolation of the workings of her mind and the constraints put upon it; she should have just let go of dogma.

Image by Gerardo Giuseppe

Let us consider the shrewd queen bee.

“The controlling force of the poem is the shrewd queen bee, powerful in her very evasiveness. She proves her cleverness by refusing to show herself, whether to avoid a duel with the younger virgins or to escape some random fate from the villagers. To her, power is an attitude, a matter of perceiving life and death, the familiar and the terrible, simultaneously. She manipulates the visible from her vantage point of isolation. Physically, her fate is in others' hands. Mentally she remains untouched, undetected, her mind as well as her body “sealed in wax.” Likewise, the inducted speaker—exhausted from the tedium of ignorance, fear, and unanswered questions—chooses immobility. Despite her outward conformity, she remains “a gullible head untouched by their {the bees} animosity.” (Broe 100)

I thought this very interesting as I delved into my antics and shenanigans with the honey bees. I hope that my little part to play with the propagation of pollinators is rewarding as well as functional. The world needs more pollinators.

If you would like to read Plath's work online, I found a blogspot that has it available because this work is hard to find online so you would have to use a library card or buy a book with the work published inside.
Enjoy.

http://strongverse.blogspot.com/2013/01/sylvia-plaths-bee-poems.html

 

Written by: Angelia Y Larrimore

~Courtesy of the AOFH~

Enjoy Sylvia Plath!