1. Sylvia Plath’s father, Otto Plath, was an avid beekeeper throughout his life. As she was raised in such close affiliation with bees and then kept her own bees for about one year at the end of her life, she became an expert on bees. As few of us are knowledgeable on bees, this has a great effect on understanding the surface meaning which leads to understanding the deeper themes. First, read the poem. Are there parts you do not understand? Next, read the information provided on bees and beekeeping. How does this affect your understanding of the poem?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beekeeping (Click this link for bee information and read the sections titled "Traditional Beekeeping", "Modern Beekeeping", "Types of Beekeepers" under "Beekeeping in the United States", and "Bee Colonies".)

Also read the "Virgin Queen" section of the "Queen Bee" page. (Ignore the "Piping" section below). Here is that link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee.

 

2. First, read Sylvia Plath's poem "Wintering". It is the 5th and final piece in her "bee series", which were all written in about a one week period. Then compare and contrast "Wintering" and "The Bee Meeting". How has the speaker, who is the same throughout the bee poems, grown and changed since "The Bee Meeting"? How has the tone changed? What do the two poems reflect on Plath's life at the time (very soon after her divorce with Ted Hughes and the year before her suicide)?

Wintering

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife's extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant's rancid jam
and the bottles of empty glitters--
Sir So-and-so's gin.

This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects--
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees--the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin

To make up for the honey I've taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women--
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.