43 pages • 1-hour read
The Honey Bus
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Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Foulbrood”
One day in the fall of 1978, Sally unexpectedly calls Meredith into her bedroom and asks for her help contacting spirits using a Ouija board, a popular board game in which a tool called a planchette is used to spell out answers to questions. Initially, Meredith is excited to be asked to help her mother. However, her excitement soon fades as she realizes that her mother is truly searching for answers. Sally asks whether she’ll find a new husband or boyfriend, and Meredith pushes the planchette to respond “yes” in order to escape her mother’s game. She manipulates the game so that her mother believes that her new boyfriend will be rich. Satisfied, Sally falls asleep, allowing Meredith to leave.
Meredith runs out of the house to join her grandfather, who is going to visit his hives in Big Sur. When they arrive at the apiary, Meredith notices a mass of dead bees on the ground. Grandpa explains that the hive is kicking out the drone bees, who do not work and take up resources. Meredith is disturbed by this violence. Grandpa discovers that many of his hives are infected with foulbrood, a bacterial disease that kills larvae and spreads quickly. He reluctantly decides to burn the infected hives, explaining that it’s the only way to save the rest. He explains that bee pollination is essential to the landscape of Big Sur, and Meredith vows to help him build back his bee population.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Parents Without Partners”
After six years of living in California, Meredith feels like her mother is more of a sister than a parent. She ignores her children most of the time, leaving the responsibilities of parenthood to Granny. As a result, Meredith and Matthew are surprised when Sally invites them to go bowling with her. On the hour-long drive, she explains that the event is organized by Parents without Partners, a dating group for single parents. She makes Meredith and Matthew promise not to ask for money to buy things for themselves. Before entering, she asks Meredith if she looks fat. Meredith thinks yes but says no.
At the event, Sally quickly abandons Meredith and Matthew to join the other parents. The other children begin to bully Matthew and refuse to let them join their game. When Meredith asks her mother to help stop the kids bullying Matthew, she explodes at both of them, insisting that they need to grow up. Frightened by her mother’s anger, Meredith locks herself in a bathroom stall. Her mother tries to break down the door but is stopped by a manager, who kicks them out. On the drive home, Meredith tries to remember what her mother was like before the divorce. When she tells Grandpa about the event, he tells her that Sally is not going to change, and he warns her to stay out of Sally’s way and keep quiet until she is old enough to live on her own.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Social Insect”
In in the fall of 1982, Meredith starts at Carmel Middle School, a large school serving students from across the Monterrey Peninsula. There, she meets Sophia, a tall, fashionable girl whose single mother, Dominique, owns a hair salon. Meredith is fascinated by Sophia’s life, which seems the opposite of her own: Unlike Sally, Dominique is independent, happy, and loving. Meredith begins to spend all of her time at Sophia’s, avoiding her own mother as much as possible. Initially, she is embarrassed of her own home and family life. When Sophia expresses interest in beekeeping, however, Meredith realizes that she also has something interesting to offer her cool new friend.
Sally takes Meredith to visit a garage sale but acts erratically throughout the trip, asking to use the bathroom and rifling through the homeowner’s things. Meredith realizes that her mother has a serious mental health condition and wonders why she can’t have a mother like Sophia’s.
Realizing that she knows nothing about Grandpa, Meredith asks why he chose to be a beekeeper. He says that he feels obligated to take care of the bees and make space for them to live freely. He explains that some beekeepers lease hives to industrial farmers, moving them from farm to farm to pollinate crops. These bees spend more time on the road than in the fields. Grandpa explains to Meredith that he keeps bees in order to take care of them and honor their role in the ecosystem.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Hot Water”
Shortly after Meredith begins middle school, the house next door becomes available to rent, and Granny secures it for their family. Sally gets a job and pays Granny rent. Although their new home is tiny and run-down, Meredith is excited to have her own space and stop sharing a bed with her mother. Forced to pay her own bills for the first time, Sally becomes tyrannical, forbidding Meredith and Matthew from eating without permission and monitoring their hot water and electricity usage. Eventually, Meredith and Matthew return to eating and bathing at their grandparents’ house.
Meredith decides to defy her mother’s orders and refill her bathtub with more hot water after it’s gone cold. When Sally hears the running water, she runs into the bathroom and pulls Meredith out, demanding to know what she’s doing. Meredith attempts to run away, but Sally tackles her, pinning her to the ground and screaming in her face. As Meredith struggles, Sally slaps and scratches at her. Meredith escapes to her grandparents’ house where Granny accuses her of upsetting Sally unnecessarily. Meredith refuses to apologize and begins to sleep at her grandparents’ house.
Soon after, the grandparents buy a small camper trailer for Matthew to live in, explaining that he’s too old to share a room with Meredith. Meredith realizes that her grandparents won’t stop her mother’s behavior but are trying to build lives for themselves around it. She determines to protect Matthew and herself.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
This section of The Honey Bus reflects the memoir’s thematic interest in The Interconnectedness of Plant, Animal, and Human Lives. The section is bookended by descriptions of family violence—in humans and insects—caused by resource scarcity. The similarities between these descriptions suggest that violence is inherent to both human and animal life. In Chapter 10, Meredith is surprised to learn that female bees will kill male drone bees—their fathers and brothers—during the lean winter months rather than share resources. She personifies the conflict, writing that “one pitiful drone was trying to get back into his hive, but kept getting pushed back by the bees guarding the entrance” (202). The fight is described in brutal detail: “[T]he two bees attacked him, each one biting and pulling on a wing until the trio tumbled to the ground and continued wrestling” (202). The use of the words “pitiful,” “guarding,” and “wrestling” in these passages add emotional weight and drama to the description of insect activity, drawing connections between humans and animals.
In Chapter 13, Meredith herself faces violence at the hands of her mother, and the descriptions of this abuse recall the violence in Chapter 10. After Sally learns that Meredith has used more than her share of hot water, she begins to brutally attack her, “pinning [Meredith] underneath her like a wrestler” (252). This image echoes the image of the wrestling bees from Chapter 10, drawing a connection between the violence of the hive and the violence of Meredith’s home. After pinning Meredith, Sally “buried her hands in [Meredith’s] wet hair, curled her fingers around two hanks of it and pulled” until Meredith’s hair fell out (253). Similarly, the extreme violence of Sally pulling out Meredith’s hair recalls the violence of the guard bees pulling out the drones’ wings. Although Meredith does not explicitly compare her mother’s attack to the hive violence she witnessed earlier, the repeated use of wrestling imagery and the focus on pulling establishes a connection between the two scenes and suggests that violence is inherent to life on Earth when resources are scarce. This identification of patterns across species supports the memoir’s thematic interest in the interconnectedness of animal, human, and plant life.
Elsewhere in this section of the memoir, Grandpa explicitly addresses the interconnectedness of life on Earth while explaining the importance of beekeeping to Meredith. In Chapter 10, Grandpa explains to Meredith that “honey isn’t what’s important” about beekeeping (209). He encourages her to focus on the bees’ role in pollination so that the environment doesn’t collapse. His examples of loss center human experience, describing how the loss of pollinators would mean “no more pumpkins at Halloween. Summers without watermelon. The cherries Granny likes in her Manhattans—gone” (210). These examples demonstrate the interconnectedness of human and animal life on Earth: although Meredith is thinking only of what she can take from the bees, Grandpa insists that the bees are already contributing to her life in significant ways. Working closely with the bees and listening to Grandpa’s perspective helps Meredith to understand the interconnectedness of human and animal life.
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