The Music of Bees

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Chapters 21-26

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 21-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 21 Summary: “Requeening”

At work, Alice is at odds with another employee, Nancy Gates. In addition, Alice is alarmed to learn that the county has a noxious-weed program that would involve a large expansion of the use of SupraGro pesticides and would affect every road, park, and school in the county. It would also poison wildflowers, and the runoff would pollute creeks and rivers. Bill Chenowith, the department director, announces that he’s retiring and that Nancy will succeed him. Everyone is surprised since they’d assumed that Alice was next in line for the position. Rich Carlson offers her a new position as senior staff manager, with a 15% raise, but that would involve taking on Nancy’s old job as well as her own. Alice turns it down and resigns on the spot. She immediately goes to a meeting of the Watershed Alliance and offers her assistance, using her access to county planning department files to retrieve relevant information. The spraying of pesticides is due to begin in two weeks, and the alliance, now including Alice, resolves to do all it can to stop it.

Chapter 22 Summary: “Swarm Warning”

Harry talks enthusiastically about kiteboarding while Alice figures out her next moves. She plans to visit as many farms as she can in the next 14 days to alert them to the imminent spraying of pesticides. She learns from an intern in the planning department that Rich Carlson plans to get back at her for quitting her job by revealing something concerning about her sister-in-law, Evangelina Ryan. The sympathetic intern also gives Alice a jump drive on which he has placed all the documents concerning the county’s agreement with SupraGro. Alice visits her neighbor Doug Ransom, who now regrets using SupraGro. He signs the petition that Alice is circulating.

Chapter 23 Summary: “Guarding”

Alice tells Harry and Jake that for their own good, they should stay away from the upcoming protest in the county. Now jobless, she says she can’t pay Harry until the end of the month. Harry and Jake discuss what they’ll do when they leave Alice’s farm. They then drive to the morgue in the small town of Bingen to collect Uncle H’s ashes.

Chapter 24 Summary: “Hive Splitting”

Alice drops one of the hives, and Jake sustains many bee stings. Before this incident, Alice had an awkward meeting with Fred Paris, a local orchardist. She told him about a study showing that orchards near healthy honeybees showed a 25% increase in fruit production, but Fred countered with another study that claimed a 50% increase in yield with the use of commercial products. Alice responded that the study was financed by SupraGro. Fred took no notice, however, and planned to go ahead with the SupraGro pesticides. Later, Alice meets with her brother-in-law, Ron, Evangelina’s husband. She says she has found out that Rich Carlson wants to target Evangelina for allegedly employing undocumented workers at her restaurant. Alice says she knows the allegation is untrue.

Chapter 25 Summary: “Robbing”

The group of protesters, which includes environmental and labor groups, beekeepers, and students from Portland, march until they reach Randy Osaka’s driveway, where they sit down and block the county road so that the spray truck that has just appeared can’t get by. However, a group of local men led by Fred Paris attacks the peaceful protesters. A fight breaks out, and the police arrive. While the driver of the spray truck is out of his cab and distracted, Harry jumps into the truck and drives it to where his uncle’s recently demolished trailer used to stand. A number of people, including Jake and Alice, are arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. Alice calls a lawyer, who happens to be Amri’s father, and Alice and Jake are soon bailed out. The protest makes the national news, and SupraGro faces fierce criticism. The company agrees to pay restitution to anyone injured during the protest and to reassess its contract with Hood River County.

Chapter 26 Summary: “Bee Day”

In April of the following year, Jake has completed a beekeeper apprentice program. Additionally, for a certification program, he helps children in an elementary school develop their own hives. His girlfriend, Amri, has also learned how to work with bees. Meanwhile, the former director of the planning department, Bill Chenowith, has been sentenced to a long prison term for embezzling more than a million dollars from the county, and the county commissioners are considering banning some pesticides in the orchards and limiting the use of others.

Alice is flourishing and aims to have 150 bee hives by July. She has also bought the orchard of her neighbor Doug and made Jake an equal partner in the beekeeping business. Meanwhile, Harry, who had expected to return to jail for violating his parole, is working for a kiteboarding company in Texas. He escaped punishment for commandeering the pesticide truck because the sheriff’s deputy who apprehended him was Ronnie, Alice’s nephew, who filed a false report about the incident. Harry will soon return to work at Alice’s farm.

Chapters 21-26 Analysis

The novel’s final six chapters are action packed as the plot element involving the pesticide company and Hood County comes to a head, foregrounding the theme of Environmental Activism and Personal Responsibility. In Chapter 21, the unfairness of Alice’s working environment at the county planning office becomes glaringly apparent. Her nearly two-decade career there is about to abruptly end, and the unpleasantness of her colleagues Rich Carlson, Bill Chenowith, and Nancy Gates is fully revealed. These are entirely one-dimensional characters who serve as cardboard villains, almost too bad to be true.

To make Rich an easily identifiable villain, his moral decrepitude manifests in his unappealing physical appearance: He “rub[s] his skinny hands together. The sound of his dry skin ma[kes] Alice flinch” (249). He smiles at Alice, “his yellow tooth poking out from under his thin upper lip” (249); Alice sees that “bits of dandruff dust[] the dark polyester of his shoulders” (249). He “fill[s] up his time without really doing anything” (243), and yet he gets an annual raise, while the hardworking Alice has not had one in four years. Such connections between evilness and physical repulsiveness are often used to signal flat, static villains.

Bill, the boss, does little actual work, always leaving the office early and cutting an unattractive figure at office meetings. He keeps refusing Alice a raise with the excuse that the budget is frozen. It later turns out that he is an out-and-out criminal, having embezzled large amounts of money from the county. Alice also believes that he was having an affair with Nancy.

Nancy is likewise presented in a negative light every time she’s mentioned. She has equal status with Alice as assistant to the director, but in practice, Alice does most of the work. Nancy is petty and small-minded and doesn’t pull her weight. She prefers an easy time; she “[comes] in late, [leaves] early, and spen[ds] hours circulating the office with a cup of coffee […] collecting gossip. She ha[s] something on everyone” (247). In her conversations with Alice, she always takes the side of the managers, and she and her colleague have some angry exchanges.

Alice realizes that it’s time for her to quit her job and stand up for what she knows is right. She’s more self-directed now. She feels that she has been living in the wrong kind of way for some years, cooped up in an office and not speaking up about issues she cared about and policies she regarded as wrong. She has a new a sense of urgency, and she’s also aware of how fond she has become of her new little family, “this funny boy [Jake] and the other one too—nervous Harry” (281).

Jake’s love for the bees has driven him to experience great personal growth as well as professional achievement related to beekeeping, while Alice has expanded her hives, completing the theme of Beauty and the Bees. Harry also gains confidence from his success in kiteboarding, which he embraces wholeheartedly. His farcical encounter with Ronnie, the incompetent, nervous young deputy, provides an amusing and unexpected (if far-fetched) way that Harry escapes being sent back to jail. In addition, the two characters mirror each other’s nervous personalities, though Harry is further along his journey of personal growth. The novel cunningly suspends the resolution of this incident until the very end, thus creating a feeling of suspense about what happened to Harry.