Secret Life of Bees

Every chapter in the book “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd starts with a quote. The quotes are from books about bees and beekeeping and are referring to the happenings in the chapters in an abstract way.
This is the quote which introduces the first chapter of the book:
“The queen for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.”
Lily is a fourteen years old girl who lives with her father T.Ray on a peach farm. The relationship between them is not how a father-daughter relationship should be. He punishes her and is more caring for his dog than her. They have a worker in their house, Rosaleen. She is the only person Lily can talk to, and she has been working for them ever since Lily’s mother, Deborah, died. She was only four years old when it happened and she blames herself for her mother’s death. In the novel it also seems like T.Ray is blaming her for the accident too, and this is mainly the part where the quotation comes in. The quote says that if the queen bee, which is Deborah, is taken away from the other bees they will feel the absence and “show unmistakable signs of queenlessness”. The other bees are of course Lily and T.Ray who miss Deborah very much. Even though the novel doesn’t say anything about how T.Ray feels about his loss, it is obvious after the way he behaves. Would the father-daughter relationship have been different if Deborah never died? Probably yes. He wouldn’t have the hatred against Lily for killing his wife and Lily would also have a mother who could fix her hair. In the chapter Lily is mainly talking about her thoughts around her loss of her mother and how her life is living in the peach farm with T.Ray.
Later on in the novel Lily and Rosaleen runs away from the peach farm. Lily wants to find out more about her mother who she has no memory of, except from the day she died. They end up in Tiburon in a pink house where the three sisters May, June and August live. They welcome them with open arms (except from June who is very suspicious to the newcomers) and this is where Lily’s journey to find more out about her mother starts.
I feel that the “queen bee” in the novel is one of the three sisters, August. She is caring and loving to everyone and is a warm and tender person. She takes Lily and Rosaleen into her house with no question asked and let them stay there for a long time to let them work on her bee farm. I’m not finished reading the book, but I hope that if Lily does not find comfort in what she finds about her own mother, she will find it in August as a mother figure.