Bees (Symbol)
It's not easy to say definitively what the bees in the poem represent, nor is it easy to say whether they're intended to be literal or entirely metaphorical. Plath leaves a great many interpretations available. However, it's clear that the bees evoke and represent something that the speaker both desires and fears. She craves their attention but is afraid they will harm her. She enjoys having power over them, but simultaneously feels guilty about having too much and feels unsure of how much she actually has. She possesses the bees and has a lot of control over them, but can never fully understand or exert control over them. We can understand the bees to represent children, men, or even the speaker's own thoughts, among other possibilities. Despite the many differences between these people and things, the speaker might have a complex emotional relationship and power dynamic with any of them.
The Trees (Symbol)
The speaker feels extremely ambivalent about her bees. She wants a degree of intimacy and attention from them, but she also hopes that they won't cause her harm, and seeks ways to avoid their attention entirely. In general, the poem is a chronicle of her vacillation between these imperfect choices. The cherry and laburnum trees represent her ambivalence. At first they seem to stand in for invisibility. Not only does the speaker say that the bees may forget her when she turns into a tree, but the very image of turning into a tree evokes the Greek mythological figure of Daphne, who does just that to avoid unwanted advances from Apollo. Yet the trees the speaker mentions are anything but invisible. She mentions cherry and laburnum trees; the former have often been used in art to evoke sexuality and sensuality, and the latter are highly poisonous. She then compares them to both human-made architecture and to women, mentioning their "blonde colonnades" and "petticoats." Altogether, these images depict the trees as conventionally beautiful, meticulously maintained, and feminine. The trees are, all at once, invisible and extremely visible—and the speaker cannot decide which one she prefers to be.
