Hatched for one purpose and one purpose only, to protect both home and mother, even if it means your life is lost in the process. This is a bee’s reality; intense, structured, and maybe even a little depressing. Bees are used throughout Sue Monk Kidd’s novel “The Secret Life of Bees” as symbolism for how Lily interacts with society, her family/friends, and herself. As Lily, the narrator/protagonist grows and matures into a woman, there are many examples and references to how bees are very alike to how we, as humans, coincide and work together as a whole; or in many cases, 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 that someone to fix her “hair that stuck out in eleven different directions,”(3) or to “. . . make 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 “