43 pages • 1 hour read
The Honey Bus
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Themes
The Interconnectedness of Plant, Animal, and Human Lives
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses abuse and depression.
Of all of the lessons that Grandpa teaches Meredith in The Honey Bee, the most important is the interconnectedness of plant, animal, and human lives on Earth. As a beekeeper, Grandpa regularly works with small, seemingly insignificant creatures; however, he teaches Meredith that bees are as important as every other life on Earth and should be treated as such. Throughout the memoir, Meredith May demonstrates that there are infinite connections between human and non-human lives.
When Meredith and her family first move to California, the state is experiencing a severe drought. As a result of watering restrictions, “Grandpa was letting his fruit trees die, and he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough flowers for the bees to make honey” (49). May is careful to note that Grandpa’s concern is not a loss of income from lack of honey sales but rather the bees’ ability to maintain a healthy hive. As pollinators, Grandpa’s bees play an essential role in the local ecology, so he sees losing hives as “a setback to nature itself” (211). Widespread loss of pollinators can lead to fewer flowering and fruiting plants, which can impact animals that rely on those plants for food. Working with Grandpa’s beehives solidifies in Meredith a belief in that “every creature, no matter how small, helped keep everyone else alive in a hidden organization” (211). As she learns more about pollination and food chains, the hidden organization of interconnected lives on Earth becomes clearer.
For Meredith, acknowledging the interconnectedness of human, animal, and plant lives has several effects. First, it makes non-human beings more familiar, as when Meredith compares a queen bee to “a movie star” whose fans “worship” her every move (102). In the same vein, Meredith suggests that “bees have emotions, like people” (66), and she takes those emotions into account when interpreting bee behavior. Drawing connections between animal and human behavior helps Meredith to understand both. Acknowledging these connections also offers Meredith the “comforting assurance that there was hidden life all around me, and that made my own problems seem smaller somehow” (106). Acknowledging her connection to other lives helps Meredith to make sense of her own.
The Lasting Effects of Trauma
Meredith May and her mother struggle to deal with painful events in their lives. The memoir suggests that the effects of traumatic events—in particular, abuse suffered in childhood—can stay with a person for years afterward. May attributes her mother’s abusive nature to the abuse she suffered as a child and shows that the collective trauma of this intergenerational abuse has a tangible impact on her family.
The lasting effects of trauma are most evident in the interactions with Sally’s birth father. Although she does not yet know about the abuse her mother suffered, Meredith senses a darkness in her new grandfather, and anticipates some kind of harm: “My heartbeat sped up and I swallowed apprehensively, waiting for him to tell me what I had done wrong and what my punishment would be” (141). That Meredith not only identifies the tension between her mother and grandfather but also anticipates his anger at her points to the lasting effects of Sally’s trauma and suggests that Meredith has inherited it. Sally’s behavior on the drive home also indicates the lasting effects of her physical trauma. Spending time with her father brings Sally back to the mental state she was in when he abused her, and Meredith describes watching her mom “hitting her thigh with her fist” and “shaking, and she might have been crying” (145). Meredith ultimately realizes that her mom’s “unpredictable moods were a part of her personality” as a result of the abuse she suffered as a child (241). Although Sally is now an adult with her own children, the lasting effects of the trauma of her childhood remain with her.
The abuse Sally suffered in childhood is not revealed to Meredith until she is about to leave home for college. This insight into her mother’s trauma makes Meredith more empathetic: “[O]f course Mom was a bewildered parent. She’d never been shown unconditional love” (295). Meredith’s empathy in this moment reflects her belief in the lasting effects of trauma, which allows abusive behaviors to be “recycled through the generations” (296). The memoir suggests that the abuse Sally suffered in childhood has long lasting effects, preventing her from being able to show love to her own children.
The Importance of Family Support
The central tension in The Honey Bus comes from Meredith’s tumultuous relationship with her mother Sally. Although Sally is not an active or loving mother after her divorce, Meredith and her brother Matthew do receive emotional support from other family members, such as their grandparents and each other. The importance of family support is an essential theme across the memoir: May’s examples demonstrate that humans and bees need support from their family in order to live healthy lives.
Grandpa offers the clearest example of the positive benefits of family support. Although he is not related to Matthew and Meredith by blood, he acts as a surrogate parent for both. When Meredith brings Grandpa to school in place of her father, she doesn’t feel the need to explain their relationship, simply saying, “[W]e were a pair, and that’s all that mattered” (130). Grandpa’s support for Meredith and Matthew comes in the form of quality time. The emphasis on love, education, and consideration in their relationship demonstrates May’s belief in the importance of family support. As Meredith and Matthew age, Grandpa’s teachings take “a more serious undertone” as he urges them to think beyond Via Contenta and to consider what we wanted” (269). Grandpa’s desire to teach, emotional support, and genuine care for Meredith and Matthew makes him a positive example of the importance of family support for children and young adults.
The memoir repeatedly describes bees as social insects. Because hives are populated by a single queen, Meredith also considers each hive to be a family. The memoir’s depiction of bee society suggests that they, too, rely on family support. When Meredith finds a lone honey bee, Grandpa tells her that she cannot keep it because bees “will lose their spirit if they don’t have the security of their hive mates” (66). Because Meredith feels insecure in her own family life, she relates to the bees’ need for family. Later, she learns that if a hive is deemed to be “unsafe” (275), then bees will, “move to someplace better, abandoning a home that is too drafty or damp, too low to the ground where predators can get it, or too small for their growing family” (275). This passage suggests that, like humans, bees make decisions in order to support the safety of the family unit. The bees offer Meredith a hopeful example of the importance of family support.
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