[1] The novel opens and closes with a brief frame narrative describing the human owners of an orchard on the edge of a town, in which lies the beehive of an elderly beekeeper.
For example, the world of the hive, most of whose inhabitants are biological sisters, is conceptualised in ways that evoke a medieval Christian nunnery, with the queen bee thought of as a divine mother-figure evoking the Virgin Mary in Roman Catholicism; the small number of male drones are conceptualised as rumbunctious, ruff-wearing knights; rooms include nurseries and the Chapel of Wax; the hum of the bees in the hive is conceptualised as the Holy Chord.
For these reasons, the fertility police plan to kill her, but a cold and rainy summer has left the hive short-handed, and the priestess Sister Sage intervenes to save the talented heroine.
Sister Sage sets Flora 717 to work in the nursery, feeding royal jelly (referred to by the bees as "flow") to the larvae.
Refusing to co-operate with the fertility police, Flora is threatened with execution but again saved by Sister Sage, who sends her to work in Sanitation.
The Queen's ladies in waiting take Flora to the Holy Library, a hexagonal chamber the scents of whose walls contain six key chapters in the collective memory of the hive.
Flora gets to read its scent panels, learning of predators outside the hive, "the Kindness" (the practice of killing infirm, deviant, or elderly bees), what the reader recognises as the robbery of honey by humans, and other phenomena which she struggles to comprehend.
Before she does, disaster strikes the foragers when they collect pollen from a field of rape that has been doused with pesticide, bringing illness and polluted food into the hive.
Learning to make beeswax to form a cradle, she finds a hidden place in which to lay her second egg, but it is destroyed when the hive's human cultivator intrudes at the end of the season to remove honeycomb.
Flora's foraging expeditions see her fleeing crows, escaping a trap laid by wasps, colliding with a mobile phone mast, receiving prophetic wisdom from spiders, and exploring a conservatory.
As the disorder in the hive grows, several "princesses" (virgin queens) are born to different kin and begin to fight to the death.
[2]: 346 In an interview, Paull commented that I found out about the 1 in 10,000 rarity of the sterile female worker, who will spontaneously begin forming eggs in her body, to the consternation of certain of her sisters, who even biologists refer to as "the fertility police".