"They are very hard to demonize if you are not a suicidal poet."

I just love that sentence. :)

Hope your colony flourishes.

Thank you, Sean! So far so good!

Good luck with the bees Erin! I enjoyed the short movie you posted when your were starting a colony last year. I first read Plath as a young teenager, and I still like to go back and read her every now and then. She was a great talent, though it must have been hard to be around someone so self centered and neurotic.

Here is another take on her from Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, a collection of poems that deal with his relationship with Plath, and written n the decades after her suicide.

The Bee God

When you wanted bees I never dreamed
It meant your Daddy had come up out of the well.

I scoured the old hive, you painted it,
White, with crimson hearts and flowers, and bluebirds.

So you became the Abbess
In the nunnery of the bees.

But when you put on your white regalia,
Your veil, your gloves, I never guessed a wedding.

That Maytime, in the orchard, that summer,
The hot, shivering chestnuts leaned towards us,

Their great gloved hands again making their offer
I never know how to accept.

But you bowed over your bees
As you bowed over your Daddy.

Your page a dark swarm
Clinging under the lit blossom.

You and your Daddy there in the heart of it,
Weighing your slender neck.

I saw I had given you something
That had carried you off in a cloud of gutturals –

The thunderhead of your new selves
Tending your golden mane.

You did not want me to go but your bees
Had their own ideas.

You wanted the honey, you wanted those big blossoms
Clotted like first milk, and the fruit like babies.

But the bees’ orders were geometric –
Your Daddy’s plans were Prussian.

When the first bee touched my hair
You were peering into the cave of thunder.

That outrider tangled, struggled, stung –
Marking the target.

And I was flung like a headshot jackrabbit
Through sunlit whizzing tracers

As bees planted their volts, their thudding electrodes,
In on their target.

Your face wanted to save me
From what had been decided.

You rushed to me, your dream-time veil off.
Your ghost-proof gloves off.

But as I stood there, where I thought I was safe,
Clawing out of my hair

Sticky, disemboweled bees,
A lone bee, like a blind arrow,

Soared over the housetop and down
And locked onto my brow, calling for helpers

Who came –
Fanatics for their God, the God of the Bees,

Deaf to your pleas as the fixed stars
At the bottom of the well.

Thank you, Tom! I did not know this poem -- it's beautiful. I did know Plath's introduction to bees came from her father, an entomologist who wrote a book about bumblebees. This poem brings that fact full circle, memorializing Plath's memorializing, all by way of bees.