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    The Bees
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    The Bees
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    The Bees
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Bees

    Written by Laline Paull

    Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015

    Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Fiction 2015

    Enter a whole new world, in this thrilling debut novel set entirely within a beehive.

    Born into the lowest class of her society, Flora 717 is a sanitation bee, only fit to clean her orchard hive. Living to accept, obey and serve, she is prepared to sacrifice everything for her beloved holy mother, the Queen.

    But Flora is not like other bees. Despite her ugliness she has talents that are not typical of her kin. While mutant bees are usually instantly destroyed, Flora is removed from sanitation duty and is allowed to feed the newborns, before becoming a forager, collecting pollen on the wing. She also finds her way into the Queen’s inner sanctum, where she discovers secrets both sublime and ominous.

    But enemies are everywhere, from the fearsome fertility police to the high priestesses who jealously guard the Hive Mind. And when Flora breaks the most sacred law of all her instinct to serve is overshadowed by an even deeper desire, a fierce love that will lead to the unthinkable . . .

    Laline Paull’s chilling yet ultimately triumphant novel creates a luminous world both alien and uncannily familiar. Thrilling and imaginative, ‘The Bees’ is the story of a heroine who, in the face of an increasingly desperate struggle for survival, changes her destiny and her world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateMay 6, 2014
    ISBN9780007578351
    Unavailable
    The Bees
    Author

    Laline Paull

    Laline Paull studied English at Oxford, screenwriting in Los Angeles, and theater in London. She lives in England with her husband, photographer Adrian Peacock, and their three children.

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    Reviews for The Bees

    4/5

    635 ratings84 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      This book was quite a surprise! It was a novel about bees! It was life in the hive. Flora 717 was born into one of the lower castes of bees, a sanitation worker. It is her story throughout the book as she meets priestesses, drones, the Queen, the fertility police, and treacherous spiders. This is a world where only the Queen can breed, deformity means death, and the mantra inside the hive is accept, obey, and serve. I was unaware that this was originally written as a YA dystopian novel. I would certainly never describe it as YA or dystopian; I would classify it as as an adult sci/fantasy. This book was wildly imaginative. I would describe it as Animal Farm on steroids. I would think some of the parallels would be too complex for most young adults (teens). This is the ultimate world building novel. Had I known it was actually ABOUT bees, I probably would not have purchased the book, but I'm glad I did. It's refreshing to read outside ones genre comfort. 5 stars for creativity, 3 1/2 stars for readability.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A brilliantly written look into our precious life givers, the bees!
    • 5/5
      [The Bees] by [[Laline Paull]]; Orange/Baileys S/L, 2015; (5*)I read this one in bed in two nights. What a fascinating read. I was enchanted by the storytelling and the characters of the bees. The only thing I can find myself comparing this book to is the movie [Bugs] and I loved it even more.[The Bees] is a very nicely done bit of fiction on the life of the hive and all of the workers & the queen therein. I loved reading about the hierarchy of the hive and all of the different jobs of the workers told in the voice of a sanitation worker. I realize that this is a work of fiction but it has spurred me on to find a good nonfiction book on bees. I can definitely see why this one is on the short list for the Bailey's Women's Fiction prize.
    • 4/5
      The writing is really good. The story drew me right in. What is it about? It is possible that The Bees will defy review. I have read a lot of reviews that compare this book to A Handmaid's Tale, or decided it's a story about race or gender bias or the environment. I don't really think so. I think it's a story about bees, if a hive went dystopian and nobody really noticed. So if an author could insert themselves into the life of a hive and write a novel of a bee who notices that all is not right with the hive and decided to maybe do something about it, wouldn't that be cool? Even better, this bee turns out to be just herself, brave, heroic, and kind, but just herself. So, I think you should read it and make it about whatever you want, because that's what stories are for.
    • 2/5
      I really struggled to get into this - the writing is fine and the plot feels action-packed, but I couldn't really bring myself to care about the 'characters'.
    • 5/5
      I did not know what to expect from this book. If i were not reading it for a book club i would never have chosen it. This was different but very good. Flaura was willing to do whatever it took to survive.
    • 4/5
      If you're a beekeeper you should definitely give this a try. At first, I was troubled by the caste system superimposed on the classification by age, but eventually, I became accustomed to it, and it does help motivate the plot. The framing narrative is awful and trite, but mercifully short. The whole book is replete with sex and violence and terror.
    • 4/5
      “717! You are behaving like a demented bluebottle - stop that!”

      This story is about the unusual lower cast bee called "717" and her journey of becoming Flora and later a Queen.

      Captivating fiction with and about bees, engaging plot, and a likable main character who moves up the social ladder and out-steps her predetermined fate. This is not a social criticism story, although if you want it, it can be read in that key. I read it from the point of view of entertainment: there is a likable character, an unusual setting, and different ways of running and changing a society, unlike the human reactions. I have no background in biology, so I cannot form an opinion about how accurate the account is regarding the hive life, the interactions, the communication methods.
      The writing style was engaging, with short, rhythmic phrases and a clear, chronological flow of events
    • 4/5
      The author has an amazing imagination and her world building is very strong. Lots of imaginative touches like the Queen's Prayer, 'Our Mother who art in labour...' I thought it was a little slow to get started but it picked up pace as it went along. Flora 717 was a great heroine.
    • 5/5
      5-stars for imagination and the story of bees well-told. I learned so much about the life of bees, even though most of it read like a horror story. The narration of the audiobook was excellent. It was the first book in a long time that I could not wait to get back to.
    • 5/5
      The imagination and real biology thread together to weave a tale of treachery, love, loss, brutality and sweet nectar
      Well worth the read
    • 5/5
      A tours de force of imagination, beautifully read. It will linger with me for a long time.
    • 5/5
      The novel follows one plucky little bee, Flora 717, from the moment she first breaks out of her wax cell and begins life in the hive. The hive itself is reimagined almost like a palace in a fantasy novel, where the beautiful and benevolent Queen sits in her chambers exuding love to her subjects, her priestesses keep order with merciless efficiency, the spoilt drone princes carouse and preen - and at the very bottom of the heap the Flora bees, or sanitation workers, clean up quietly and without fuss. This Flora, however, is an anomaly in the hive, and her unusually wide-ranging capabilities take her from the nursery to the gardens of the city and back again.What Paull has woven against the backdrop of an ordinary orchard beehive is ingenious. She has created a deep lore encompassing everything from the hive mind to a beekeeper's visits, and manages to make an event as apparently trivial as a marauding wasp into a genuinely nail-biting scene. I absolutely loved it; I was gripped from start to finish, my heart was pounding at several points, I cried more than once, and I think little Flora 717 might turn out to be one of my favourite and most memorable characters of recent years.
    • 4/5
      Such a good novel. Really hallucinogenic. Set in a hive where the walls are frescoed with scent. Scent is a solid, veiling faces, blocking paths, imparting information and controlling minds. The bees are anthropomorphised just enough that you can understand what’s going on and care. The book is really about us.The bees live in a monarchical theocracy. Paull has a lot to say on the subject. It put me in mind of a mix of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tail (but with bees). She has a lot to say about human behaviour regardless of the political system, particularly about crime and sin and how we deal with it. From the descriptions I take it that the hive is infected with the Deformed Wing Virus. They take the symptoms to be a result of crime and perform scapegoating rituals to keep the blame contained. They take thelytokous parthenogenesis to be a sin and perform human (I mean bee) sacrifices to remove the sin from society. This raises a number of disturbing questions in my mind. Questions about human agency, questions about where blame lies and how it can be moved around, preferably away from us.Unfortunately there’s no time to answers as the pace of this book is break-neck. I read 250 pages in a single sitting.
    • 3/5
      Bees are pretty awesome, people. This book does a great job at conveying the intricate structure of bee life. While the dangerous scenes were every bit as fearsome as you could hope for (and yes, as always, wasps are assholes), there was still an emotional connection I found difficult to quite make. Also, the whole motherhood thing just didn't do it for me, but overall, this novel gave quite an interesting personification of bees. I'd recommend Clan Apis if you're on a roll.
    • 2/5
      This book was lent to me by a friend who compared it to Watership Down. Not my kind of thing really, and maybe anyone who likes Watership Down would like this too. It contains a lot of bee lore but doesn't quite follow it through. Because some of the detail is accurate, the bits that are are not accurate stand out and are annoying.
    • 4/5
      From the moment she emerges out of her cell Flora 717 is not like the other bees. She has been born a sanitation bee, meant to clean and to take orders from all other orders of bees. But unlike her sisters she can talk. And soon she learns that she can be more. She can nurse and forage. She can become more than what she was born into.

      But the bees of her hive live according to order and caste. The Sage sisters, the priestesses of the hive seem to have plans of their own, and in this time of shortage and uncertainty are they damaging the good of the hive? Or is the actions of Flora 717 that are so terrible?

      I’m sure the very premise of this book is off-putting to some. How could someone write an entire book about the fictionalised life of a bee? And een if they did, why would anyone read it?

      Well, that second one is an easy one to answer, because it isn’t every day that a novel has a bee as its hero. The unusual often grabs people’s attention. Yes, some may be put off by it, but I’m sure that most of those who read the book will enjoy it. I know I did.

      The first thing you learn when reading The Bees is that Flora is a bee. She isn’t a human dressed up as a bee. She behaves according to instinct and chemical prompting. Her reactions and actions are not what a person might or might not do, although of course they are actions created by a human mind. Still, in many ways her world is utterly alien to the human world.

      Which makes the book all the more entertaining if you ask me.

      There is a rigid caste system1 which means that you can read this book as a commentary on human society and tyrannical power systems. There are hints of racism and prejudice everywhere. Every insect but bees are unclean and looked down on by the bees. And the different castes within the hive look down and compete with one another for power, if high ranking enough.

      There is intrigue and action. Some of it very bloody and graphic, but that is nature in operation.

      I originally decided to read this book because the author, Paull, is the British daughter of first-generation Indian immigrants and so it fitted into my Diverse Universe reading. Unfortunately I didn’t get it finished in time but I’m still really glad to have read it. It is a book that delights in being different from the usual human-centered stories. And it also highlights some of the plights of the honeybee today; pesticides, single crop farming, lack of native plants etc.
    • 2/5
      Flora 717 is on the bottom rung of the hive. Given the lowest task of ensuring it is clean she has only three orders.

      Accept, obey and serve.

      She, like her sisters, are prepared to sacrifice everything for their beloved Queen. But Flora has skills that mark her out as different from a regular sanitation worker; normally it would ensure that she would be eliminated. Trusted enough to feed the newborn bees, she begins her ascent of the strict hierarchy in the hive, and becomes a forager collecting the life giving nectar. But this simple bee also holds a secret; a desire to break the most sacrosanct of laws in the hive, one that her enemies would use against her without any hesitation.

      There were a few things that I liked about this; the dystopian feel of the book; the totalitarian society and strict etiquettes of the bees, and the sole protagonist (can you call a bee that?) who sets out to fulfil her yearning. But it didn’t quite do it, for me. The plot wasn’t too bad, but even with the twists felt a little predictable and it felt a lot like Animal Farm by Orwell, where it is alien and familiar at the same time. It was a shame really as other have really liked it and I thought that I would too. 2.5 stars overall.
    • 2/5
      The author deserves praise for creativity, that's for sure. However, the whole allegory fell flat for me. I just couldn't get into the story. Some parts were promising, but most of the time I found myself wanting to skip large chunks of boring text to see what actually happened and not much did. Some parts were very repetitive and characters all seemed cartoonish and superficial. There was no character development at all. I wonder if this book was actually marketed for YA readers. I couldn't even finish it (with less than 30 pages left), which happens very rarely for me.
    • 5/5
      I was just blown away by this book, I thought it was incredible. It's the story of a lowly sanitation worked in a beehive, told from the moment of her birth. At least, that's how she starts out, but she is an exceptional bee - perhaps a mutation, and she can move through the different, highly stratified ranks of bee society like no other. It completely immerses you in the life of a bee, in the way a good SF novel would introduce you to life on an alien world - you get thrown in at the deep end C.J.Cherryh style, but are given enough clues to gradually orientate yourself in this strange society. Before posting a review I always like to have a look at what others on LT thought, as it often helps me get my thoughts on a book together, and I feel like this book is a bit under appreciated here. One of the criticisms of the book is that it's not very realistic a portrayal of bee society, so of course now I really want to hunt down some books about what the real story is, but for me that doesn't really matter, because if you look at the book from that SF perspective I mentioned earlier, this is just an alien world the author has created, albeit one that exists at the bottom of the garden. Also, some didn't like the luck that our main character seemed to have to survive the many cataclysms that befell the hive. There is an element of the "chosen one" narrative, or the outsider who steps beyond the boundaries of the society in order to effect great change, but again, these are established literary conventions used to tell a unique story, so I don't credit that criticism. I don't know why I feel the need to defend this novel except I have fallen deeply in love with it and wish everyone else would appreciate it like I do. For me it was perfect. Seek it out if it sounds appealing and hopefully you'll enjoy it too.
    • 3/5
      The Bees is a lot of fun if you're interested in speculating on what a society run by scents, hormones, and deindividuation would be like. Which I am! There isn't much in the way of characters or plot-- things just sort of happen to Flora 717, our main character bee, until about 60% of the way through when she starts making her own decisions. A nice piece of scifi that has me reaching for books about bees.
    • 2/5
      Disclaimer: This book was a Christmas gift. I'm not sure I would have finished it if it wasn't.

      Disclaimer (2): Maybe I just didn't get it because I'm dumb. Entirely possible.

      So towards the end of 2017 I read a number of books with interesting premises or plots that were ultimately a let-down because the authors just couldn't write very well. This is the opposite of that - an author who writes beautifully, but the underlying story is very meh.

      Flora 717 is a sanitation/worker bee (yes, a literal bee) - the lowest of the low, unworthy of even an actual flower name. BUT, Flora 717 is ~special~, so she can talk, count, produce 'Flow' to feed baby bees, fight off a wasp, make wax, understand the Queen's stories, forage for pollen and nectar, and ultimately give birth to and raise a future queen.

      Does this sound unrealistic? What if I told you that a wall falls away for literally no reason, at exactly the right moment to save Flora from discovery?

      Yeah.

      Would this novel/plot/character stand up to close (or even not-so-close) inspection if the author wasn't distracting us with the novelty of "but they're all bees!!1!"?

      I don't think so.

      Bees don't save you from plot holes and weak characterisation.

      Bees.

    • 4/5
      Audiobook read by Orlagh Cassidy - This is a reread, for a book club that I run for zoo volunteers. I originally read the book in 2014 as a combination of audio and paper, this time I listened only on audio. I still found the book to be far too long, and ended up skipping sections. There are sections of the story that work really well, and others that fundamentally cannot because it is impossible to get inside the mind of an animal that does not have a mind of its own. I did not get anything more out of it reading it a second time. No one showed up for this book club meeting except me, which could be a coincidence or could be an indication of how the other members felt about the book.
    • 4/5
      Flora 717 is an anthropomorphized bee; an odd-bee-out in the hive's restrictive society who can work sanitation, gather pollen, and attend the queen while facing many dangers within and without. It's a playful, weird and sweet story.
    • 4/5
      Wonderfully written, this novel takes you into the mind of a bee! The descriptions are amazing.
    • 4/5
      For the first 100 pages or so, I wasn't sure if this was merely a writing exercise, something tricksy without real substance, but there was an aggregation of action and a genuine through-line that made the ending of the book a more satisfying payoff than many other novels I've read recently.

      I really enjoyed this.
    • 4/5
      A story of Flora 717 the sanitation worker bee tells the story of life in a hive. I read this for one reason; I wanted to read something for a challenge that was about something I feared (phobia) and I have pretty big fear of bees. I had hoped the book would be horror and I think it has a tag for horror but it really wasn't very scary but then I am not a bee. I think, mostly the depiction of hive life was accurate including the dangers in the environment the natural enemies and the man made enemies like poisons, buildings and constructs. From reading mostly Wiki article, most of what is here is factual with some creative license in a few areas. I enjoyed the book but it really never "grabbed me" but still I did enjoy learning about bee life and the story of the potential uprisings in the hive, the misuse of power also could be a allegory for life. The story is anthropomorphic and is about differences and racial identity. The parts about caste and crushes on the males is more a reflection of human society. The book also touches on the hive collapse disease which is not fully understood but of real concern. There is a bit of Orwellian, a bit of Handmaid's Tale and a bit of the Hindu Caste in this tale set in a bee hive in a farmer's field.The author writes plays and according to author information. She hopes to make this a play. I could see it as a ballet or dance performance.
    • 4/5
      This was a reading group book which I quite enjoyed. I have no idea if it's scientifically accurate or not and I don't care. It's a FANTASY. Gave me a better appreciation of bees. However if there is some sort of hidden satire on human society it passed me completely. Not the best book I've read but not terrible either.
    • 4/5
      This book was very scientifically inaccurate, but I really liked it!
    • 4/5
      What a completely unique and intriguing way to tell a story! I was simply captivated from the beginning to the end, all because of the nature of the content. The author didn't just think about what it would be like to become a member of the hive, she seems to have actually shrunk herself down and lived the life for herself in order to write about it. Every interaction from hive to the outside world feels so real that I was simply stunned by it all, and the audio version was so well performed that I felt everything come to a whole new level of reality. As far as the writing goes, the book was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for fiction and has many people swooning over it. Some part of me feels as if the swooning is over the idea more than the writing itself. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed every word, but I honestly feel that it is the plot and unusual perspective that glues itself to readers most of all. It certainly went that way for me.