I did not enjoy this book much at all! This follows the life of Flora 717, a worker bee (in sanitation) who we see from her emergence as an adult until her old age. I can only describe this book as a "bee thriller." Let's consider some general characteristics of a thriller (from a readers' advisory standpoint): 
 -Fast-paced story, all about action, check. It felt like Flora 717 just went from adventure to adventure with little character development happening (wasp, spider, bunch of wasps, serve the queen, mouse, etc, etc, etc) 
 -Professional details and jargon, in this case bee work, check. 
 -Loner hero who operates under his or her own moral code - Flora 717 pretty much defies all conventional bee life and does whatever she wants, check. 
 -(view spoiler)[It's up to the hero to save the world, check. Flora 717 gives birth to the next princess and leads her fellow bees to a new home. (hide spoiler)] 
 I do not care for thrillers or allegory, and The Bees was a bizarre combination of both. I didn't care for the writing style or the allusions to religion as some sort of fascist method to keep everybody in line. Maybe the gender stuff was a little interesting (most of the bees are female, but are constantly falling all over themselves to worship the male drones). I appreciate the research that must have gone into this book, as there were a lot of true details of bee life in this novel. If anything, it made me want to go watch a bee documentary.