What do the bees symbolize in The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd?

Bees are powerful symbols in The Secret Life of Bees (Kidd), in addition to being part of the plot structure.  At the beginning of each chapter, a quotation from a book about bees features some aspect of beekeeping that states the theme of the chapter.  Overall, the bees are symbols of mothering and community. 

In the very first chapter, the beginning quote states,

The queen...is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence (Kidd 1).

And as the chapter unfolds, we see that Lily's queen bee, her mother, is gone and that, despite the love of Rosaleen, she suffers greatly from the loss of her mother.  The bees seem to speak to her, swarming in her room to try to tell her something. By Chapter Two, after some dreadful encounters with her father and Rosaleen's problems in town with the police, Lily clutches a bee jar, emptied of bees that have flown away, and determines that she will fly away, too, taking Rosaleen with her. She hears a voice telling her "... your jar is open" (41). She decides that she will go on a quest to learn about her mother. 

When she and Rosaleen flee, they head for Tiburon, South Carolina, which is the name on the back of a memento Lily has from her mother.  There they meet and begin to live with the Boatwright sisters.  The oldest, August, is a beekeeper, and she is clearly the queen bee for the family. She becomes Lily's queen bee, too, as well as Rosaleen's, providing the love and support for the household and much of the larger community, able to answer questions for Lily about her mother's life, and putting Lily on a path to heal and be happy.

A beehive is a community that depends upon its queen bee to survive and to thrive, and throughout the entire story, Lily learns that she can thrive in a community with a wonderful queen bee, August Boatwright.      

What do the quotes at the beginning of each chapter signify in The Secret Life of Bees?

In The Secret Life of Bees, there are fourteen chapters, and in each, the beginning quote tells us about an important theme in the chapter, a way of using bees as a metaphor for the themes in the book that the characters are exemplifying.  Let's look at the beginning quote in one chapter to see how that works.  

At the beginning of Chapter Nine, we have this:

The whole fabric of honey bee society depends on communication - on an innate ability to send and receive messages, to encode and decode information. - The Honey Bee (165).

This quote is telling us that the chapter is going to focus on communication between and among the characters and how that communication is encoded and decoded. In the chapter, some examples of how this theme is borne out are in a scene that takes place with Lily and June, in a scene that takes place between Lily and May, in the communication that does not take place between Lily and August, in the communication among the townsmen and Zach and his friends, and in the communication that leads May to her death.

The relationship between Lily and June has been an uneasy one. June is hostile toward Lily because she is white, since all of June's experiences (and the times) have led her to distrust white people and make her decode improperly everything Lily has to say.  When Lily turns the garden hose on June and June turns the garden hose back on her, they are communicating their hostility like little children, but like little children, they find that the humor of the situation overcomes the hostility and breaks the barrier down the barriers between them, leading to good communication and friendship. Notice that as bees do not communicate with speech, but with various physical movements, the change in communication between Lily and June begins with a physical gesture, not with speech. 

In the same vein, it is May's physical gestures that communicate to Lily in another important scene in the chapter.  Because May cannot bring herself to kill any creature, she spreads graham crackers and marshmallows to lure roaches out of the house. Lily knows that her mother did the same thing, and she "decodes" May's gestures, understanding that her mother had learned this from May, which means that her mother had been with the Boatwright sisters.  Like two bees, Lily and May have communicated.

It is this interpretation of May's actions that makes Lily realize that she must talk to August, to find out the truth about her mother. She intends to do this immediately, but the events that take place in the rest of the chapter prevent this from taking place, putting off one of the most important pieces of communication in the book, the solving of the mystery of Lily's mother.

In the scene in the town that results in Zach being taken to jail, we have white and black men and boys communicating with gestures that are hostile.  The black young men were "glaring over at the men (178). When Zach and Lily pull up in the truck, Zach's black friends come over to the truck.  A white man approaches all of them and

[He] stared at the boys with that same half smile, half sneer...conjured from power without benefit of love (178). 

One of Zach's friends, Jackson, "bites down, causing a tiny ripple across his jaw" (178). He then throws a soda bottle at the man, and the man is injured. None of the black young men will admit who threw the bottle, and as a result, all of them are jailed.  There are words exchanged in this scene, but it is the physical gestures and facial expressions that are being decoded for the most part. And it is the black young men's refusal to communicate, to snitch, that lands them all in jail. 

In the chapter's final scenes, there is communication and a lack of communication that have profound effects upon the story. Everyone agrees that it would be best to protect May from the knowledge that Zach has been jailed, and they manage to conceal this for a while.  But when Zach's mother calls and May answers the phone, she learns the truth.  She becomes nearly catatonic at first, and after August pulls May to her and presses a cold towel to May's head, she seems to rally a bit and says, "I'll be okay" (187). She tells everyone she must go to her Wailing Wall and refuses to allow anyone to go with her. Everyone reluctantly decides to take this communication on its face, taking this to mean that May will be all right, but they really know better, deep down.  

These examples demonstrate the importance of communication and its coding and decoding in the chapter, and there are other examples, as well. This quote sets the stage for these events in the story, as the quotes in the beginnings of the other chapters do, too. 

What are the meanings of the quotes at the beginning of each chapter in The Secret Life of Bees?

1) In The Secret Life of Bees, Lily has never been able to recover from her mother's death and her unexplained obsession with bees- real or imagined - drives her search for meaning and acceptance:

The queen, ... is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, ... they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.

This first quote reflects Lily's feelings as she carries the burden of her mother's death, even now, at age fourteen, some ten years later. The queen bee is the dominant female in the hive and the "worker" bees fiercely protect her. Lily feels her own "queenlessness."

2) Rosaleen, Lily's carer, is arrested for standing up for herself after being racially insulted. This quote prepares the reader for Lily's decision to help Rosaleen escape so they can both search for answers: 

On leaving the old nest, the swarm normally flies only a few metres and settles. Scout bees look for a suitable place to start the new colony. Eventually, one location wins favor and the whole swarm takes to the air. 

Lily decides to head for Tiburon because of the picture of The Black Madonna that was her mother's. Lily thinks she will find answers there just as a bee will never go far from the source (in Lily's case, her mother) to find another suitable colony. It is the obvious choice.

3) Once in Tiburon, Lily notices the jars of honey with the Black Madonna on and is intrigued to be told that August Boatwright makes the honey. She and Rosdaleen will seek out this woman.This quote refers to the way a beekeeper will actually locate the queen bee by watching and following the other bees. Lily, searching for information, knows that she must start with August and the link to the bees and the picture of the Black Madonna:

New beekeepers are told that the way to find the elusive queen is by first locating her circle of attendants.

4) They find the house and watch August for a while. Lily is mesmerized by everything that August represents, referring to her as "the Mistress of Bees, the portal into my mother's life." Lily, misleading August, arranges to stay with August and her sisters. The relevance of the next quote can be seen in the fact that it is all women in the house. Lily finds a statue; obviously the Black Madonna, and begins to recognize her own conflicted feelings of love and hate for herself. The relevance of this quote will be revealed later when Lily discovers that the women were friends of her mother and almost involved in the equivalent of "nest building and rearing...' The Boatwright women are all very aware of others, especially May.

Honeybees are social insects and live in colonies. Each colony is a family unit, comprising a single, egg-laying female or queen and her many sterile daughters ... nest-building and rearing the offspring. Males are reared only at the times of year when their presence is required. 

5) August does, in fact, keep bees and she allows Lily to accompany her and shows her a queen bee. Bees and honey feature largely as "We lived for honey." The quote at number 4 is reinforced consistently as she learns a lot from the sisters. In the next quote, as Lily adjusts to life in the Boatwright's house:

Let's imagine for a moment that we are tiny enough to follow a bee into a hive...we would have to get used to ...the darkness. 

Lily recognizes traits in these women that she vaguely remembers about her mother.

Please post another question for the remainder. 

What do the bee quotes at the start of chapters in Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees mean?

To understand the meanings of each quote about bees in the beginning of each chapter of Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Secret Life of Bees, you first want to understand the fact being explained in the quote and then connect the fact to key events or themes in the chapter that follows.

The first quote explains the fact that the queen bee holds the community of the beehive together. She is the leader of the other bees, and if she is no longer in the hive, the other bees feel lost. As the quote states, "The workers very quickly sense her absence." The passage continues to state, "After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness." In other words, the whole hive falls into a state of panic, distress, and chaos. But a fascinating theme in this quote is the queen bee leaving the hive. To further understand the quote and how it relates to the following chapter, or even the novel as a whole, one may need to look up various reasons why a queen might leave the hive.

There are really only a few reasons why a queen will leave the hive. The first reason is for what is called "her maiden flight" in which she is fertilized by drones. A second reason is if the hive becomes overcrowded; once scouts pick out a location for a new hive, she'll then lead the swarm to the new hive. The third reason is the most dramatic and most important reason--she has died. And, as we can see from the rest of the book, death is a major theme.

It's also important to think about what author Kidd is using the queen bee to symbolize. We know that the queen gives birth to all the worker bees, so she is quite literally the mother of the hive. As we continue to read the first chapter, we learn that the protagonist Lily Owens has become obsessed with death since she was told by her father that she accidentally shot and killed her mother. Since her mother is dead, Lily is quite literally without a queen bee in her life. Lily's caretaker Rosaleen, which interestingly rhymes with queen, has taken on the role of queen bee in Lily's life, but Rosaleen proves to be an unstable queen when she is persecuted by racism and arrested for assault.

In the chapter, we see just how much Lily is missing her queen bee, her mother, in her life when she describes her hallucinations about swarms of bees, which Rosaleen said was an omen of death, and when she describes her fantasies about being with her "mother in paradise." She describes that she pictured her mother, for the "first ten thousand years," "kiss [her] skin till it grew chapped and tell [her that she] was not to blame" (p. 3).

Hence, we see that the quote is meant to symbolize the absence of Lily's mother and capture the theme of death.