The Sages, a high-ranking order of priestess bees, see something in Flora 717, and they are proven correct — she can produce Flow, royal jelly, the descriptions of which are among the most accurate descriptions of breast-feeding in fiction. “As it opened its tiny mouth to cry,” Paull writes, “two pulses began flickering in Flora’s cheeks and her mouth began to fill with sweet liquid.” Flora thrives at her new job, despite being looked down upon by the other nurses. They need her there — we know that supplies have been low because of cold and rain and lack of food — and so she remains. The first commandment of the hive is to “Accept, Obey and Serve,” and Flora is nothing if not dutiful. The dogma of the hive is paramount.

One day, when Flora 717 is lost in the transmission of the Queen’s Love (a daily communal prayer), she feels a strange sensation in her body, and the reader identifies the likely culprit before Flora does — she is carrying an egg, a blasphemous offense. This is where the book turns from a buzzy version of “Animal Farm” toward a story more inspired by Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Flora 717’s feelings for her offspring are wholly separate from her love for the queen. The novel examines what members of each class are permitted to say, think and know. Even as Flora 717 feels intense guilt about her own body, she wants to do what she knows she should not.

Despite the honor of being asked to make Flow, Flora 717 is restless, and she quickly moves up the ranks, reinventing herself yet again as a skilled forager. Flora’s first few flights are remarkably vivid. “Below her spread the great plain of different greens,” Paull writes, “pushed together in crude four-sided shapes as if by some primitive insect ignorant of the beauty of the hexagon.”

Some of my favorite scenes are of Flora in the dance hall, the room where the foragers explain where they’ve been and where to find food, all communicated through rapturous dance. There is also humor here: The male bees — preening, strutting drones — are hilarious sex fiends. “Think now of those foreign princesses waiting for us. How fatigued, how impatient for love must they be? Would you bind them in chastity a single moment longer? Or shall we fill our bellies with the strength of this hive, then free them with our swords?” This is accompanied by a suitably lewd gesture.

Through all of her flights and dances, however, Flora’s thoughts are with her egg, which she has delivered and hidden in the nursery, alongside the queen’s. She is so busy foraging that she cannot visit it. When she finally makes it to the nursery, the fertility police have killed her child — a beautiful boy, a drone. It is hard not to read the plight of the working mother in Flora 717’s heartbreak. Soon, Flora produces another egg, and she vows to care for it. Before she delivers the egg, she crafts herself a rough crib out of wax and hides the baby away in a secret chamber, one of many parts of the book that feel like a fairy tale. That egg is also lost, when the Godzilla man dismantles the hive to harvest the honey.