THE HONEY FARM

By Harriet Alida Lye

328 pp. Liveright Publishing. $25.95.

Bees are weird. The peculiar mating rituals, the doomed drones who wait all their lives for a single sexual encounter with an omnipotent queen, leading to immediate death. As humans, we find them fascinating: perhaps the only species whose gender politics are more screwed up than our own.

In “The Honey Farm,” the debut novel by the Canadian writer Harriet Alida Lye, the inner workings of a bee colony become an eerie metaphor for communal living gone awry. At the center of the novel is Silvia, a recent university graduate who replies to an exuberant online ad for “THE HONEY FARM. Free retreat for artists, writers, thinkers!” It’s unclear which category Silvia belongs to, but she is nonetheless offered room and board in exchange for work on the farm.

It seems, at first, an idyllic setting: Think Yaddo with bees. Running the show is the mysterious Cynthia, the farm’s proprietor and queen bee, who supervises the chores that occupy most of the day. The residents — two brothers who make documentary films, a French Canadian artist couple and Ibrahim, a driven young painter from Toronto, among others — are shocked to find that the farm has no internet access, no cellphone signal. Its only link to the outside world is a phone booth at the end of the lane.

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It’s a satisfying setup, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie mystery, the entire cast of characters marooned together in an exotic locale. Strange events ensue. Silvia drinks from a garden hose and finds the water blood-colored. The group is afflicted with head lice. A swim in a murky pond disturbs an unimaginable number of frogs, which soon infiltrate the house. The incidents seem related to an unprecedented drought that’s making the bees anxious. Clearly, evil is afoot.