"The Arrival of the Bee Box" is a poem by Sylvia Plath describing a speaker who orders a box full of bees and tries to figure out how to treat them. The poem was first published in Plath's posthumous 1965 poetry collection Ariel. It belongs to a set of cohesive lyric poems, all of them published in Ariel, known as Plath's "Bee Poems."
The work depicts an overwhelmed speaker contemplating what to do with the box of bees that she receives. She is simultaneously curious about them and frightened of them, and these competing impulses cause her to debate whether or not to free them. Throughout the poem, she hints at her feelings about the bees through allusions to the slave trade, Roman society, and Greek myth. Some interpretations suggest that the bees represent the speaker's own ideas and creativity, while others argue that they symbolize gendered oppression. Regardless, the poem is highly focused on the complexity of power dynamics.
"The Arrival of the Bee Box" follows no formal rhyme scheme or meter, and its seven free-verse stanzas are of varying lengths. Instead, it is propelled through subtle end- and internal rhyme, assonance, and figurative language. Like much of Plath's work, it draws extensively on her own autobiography—in this case, because her own father had been an entomologist and an expert on bees.
