43 pages • 1 hour read
Meredith MayThe Honey Bus
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Secret Language of Bees”
While exploring her grandparents’ kitchen one morning, Meredith discovers an old blender. Unsure of how to cook for herself, she makes a smoothie with mint Jell-O, milk, and corn flakes. Grandpa gamely tastes the shake before challenging Meredith to drink it herself. Before she is able to, a bee flies into the room, drawn to the scent of the sugary drink. Meredith panics, swatting the bee away violently. When Grandpa firmly grabs her arm to stop her, Meredith is shocked because Grandpa is always gentle and has never chastised her. She realizes that he is as protective of the bees as he is of his family. Grandpa teaches her how to gently capture and release bees and how to tell whether they are stressed or happy based on the frequency of their buzz. As she watches the bee up close, Meredith realizes that her Grandpa has exposed her to another world.
Energized by the discovery of the bees’ secrets, Meredith decides to return to the honey bus with Matthew to see if her younger brother can find a small hole to shimmy into. Their efforts are interrupted by Grandpa, who agrees to let her visit the beehives instead. Together, Meredith and Grandpa watch as bees leave and return to the hive. Meredith observes bees returning to the hive loaded with pollen; Grandpa explains that they use it to make “bread” for new baby bees. Grandpa explains that female bees run the hive on behalf of the queen.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Homecoming”
Meredith’s grandparents live within walking distance of the Carmel Valley Airfield, a tiny regional airfield used by two-seater planes. One day, Meredith and Matthew sneak out to the airport without their grandparents’ permission and lie down on the median between the airport’s two narrow runways. Meredith feels exhilarated as the plane flies just 20 feet over their heads, and the siblings run away when a pilot tries to question them.
Later the same day, Meredith and Matthew are watching TV when their father, David, suddenly appears at the door. Meredith’s hopes that her father has come to take them home are quickly dashed as she realizes that he has only come to deliver her mother’s car. She hears her mother yell the word divorce and wonders what it means. When her mother chases after David, Meredith follows, unable to speak. Meredith’s mother eventually stops, but Meredith continues to chase David down the street. He finally stops and embraces her tightly, promising to always love her. Meredith realizes that her time in California will be permanent.
After her father leaves, Meredith goes to her mother’s room, searching for answers. Sally closes the door in her face. Distraught, Meredith runs out of the house and begins to climb the giant eucalyptus tree, which has recently bloomed. The tree thrums with bees collecting pollen. Meredith stays in the tree until dark, observing how the bees use their legs to collect and store pollen on their bodies.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Big Sur Queen”
Sensing her sadness, Grandpa invites Meredith to drive to Big Sur to visit his honey farm. Meredith is fascinated by the changes in the landscape and animal life as they drive south from Carmel Valley through Garrapata State Park, and she is frightened by the narrow, winding roads.
The hives are kept in a bright, sunny valley on a 160-acre property. Grandpa teaches Meredith how to use a smoker to disarm the bees. Thinking that their hive is on fire, the bees gorge themselves on honey, filling their bodies so much that they grow sleepy and cannot bend to sting. Although Meredith is initially overwhelmed by the activity of the hive, Grandpa patiently teaches her the different roles that bees can take within the hive. Nurse bees tend to eggs and raise babies, worker bees build wax and make honey, and guard bees prevent strange bees from entering the hive. Most importantly, the queen bee lays all of the eggs that populate the hive. Meredith imagines the queen bee as a kind of celebrity and is shocked to hear that the bees can replace her if she dies. She wonders what it would be like to replace her mother. The bees’ dedication to the queen and her hard work for the hive are reassuring to Meredith; she believes that if motherhood is a natural state then her mother’s behavior must change. On the drive home, Meredith realizes that she felt at peace in Big Sur for the first time since coming to California.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Beekeeper”
When Granny registers her for school in the fall of 1975, Meredith realizes that her family’s move to California will be permanent. She is annoyed but not surprised that no adult has tried to explain the move to her. At a local church thrift shop, Meredith picks a green striped shirt that turns out to be part of a Girl Scout uniform. Granny insists that she pair it with a long, heavy skirt that she deems respectable. Although Meredith is horrified by her outfit, she is excited to meet friends her age.
Meredith walks by herself to school on the first day and immediately struggles to fit in. Her classmates are dressed much more casually than she is, and her skirt makes it difficult to play during recess. The fact that Meredith has a free school lunch instead of one packed by her mother also singles her out. Meredith begins to isolate herself, spending her lunch and recess inside sitting silently with her teacher. In her first week of school, Meredith’s new music teacher plays a Beatles record that reminds Meredith of her father. Hearing the song, Meredith’s “skin felt clammy, and the floor beneath me tilted” (124). She has a physical reaction to the song, feeling “heat ripple up from [her] stomach, rise up [her] throat and collect behind [her] eyes” (125). By the end of the song, she is weeping.
On Halloween, Meredith’s mother refuses to help her with a costume. Granny’s solution—a haphazard basset hound costume—leads to ridicule at school. Meredith’s reputation at school is saved by Grandpa, who cleans up and puts on a suit to give a career day presentation in the place of her father. Meredith’s classmates and their fathers are all fascinated by Grandpa’s stories of beekeeping and adventuring on the California coast. Although she misses her father, Meredith realizes that her grandfather will always be there for her.
Chapters 3-6 Analysis
This section of the episodic memoir establishes a pattern that persists throughout the book: Each chapter contains an anecdote related to Meredith’s life in California and ends with a paragraph explicitly reflecting on the lessons she took from the situation. This repeated structure highlights the tension between young Meredith’s innocence in 1975 and the adult memoirist May’s understanding of her personal history with the benefit of hindsight. Chapter 3, for example, describes the first time Meredith observed the workings of a beehive up close. She is shocked to learn that the majority of the bees she sees are female and explicitly connects the bees to her own experience, describing them as “sixty thousand daughters that look after their mother by feeding her, bringing her water droplets, and keeping her warm at night” (74). The reference to daughters keeping a mother warm evokes pathos given the fact that Meredith sleeps in the same bed as her depressed mother. The chapter ends with a reflection on the connection between mothers and daughters: “[T]he colony would wither and die without a queen laying eggs. Yet without her daughters taking care of her, the queen would either starve or freeze to death. Their need for one another was what kept them strong” (74). These lines convey The Importance of Family Support and reflect the mature, contemplative perspective of the adult memoirist, May, and contrast the confusion and relative innocence of young Meredith, the memoir’s protagonist.
In Chapter 5, Meredith and Grandpa visit the 160-acre property where Grandpa keeps hives, and Meredith sees a queen bee for the first time. As in Chapter 3, this chapter ends with a short paragraph explicitly connecting her beekeeping education with her family life. Meredith is comforted to learn that “motherhood is a natural part of nature, even among the tiniest of creatures” (110). This highlights The Interconnectedness of Plant, Animal, and Human Lives. She imagines the beehive as “a family that never quit” (110), and she contrasts this family with her own. Here too, the tension between young Meredith’s innocence and confusion and her adult understanding of the problems in her family drive the narrative forward.
In this section of the memoir, Meredith’s father David explicitly leaves their family, causing Meredith and her mother Sally a great deal of pain. May explicitly describes this as a physical pain: As she watches her father leave in Chapter 4, “a familiar dread pressed down on my rib cage” (82), and her legs feel as if they’ve been “wrapped in iron chains” (83). This is Meredith’s physical response to the trauma of her father’s abandonment. In Chapter 6, Meredith’s father is explicitly replaced by Grandpa, who visits Meredith’s class for “Take Your Dad to School Night” (129). Although she is initially worried about what her classmates will think about Grandpa’s wild dress and hair, no one questions their relationship or asks why he was there. The physical pain of her father’s abandonment is replaced with awe and gratitude for the fact that Grandpa showed up. While the memoir explores The Lasting Effects of Trauma, it also provides a sense of hope during episodes such as this.
