In this poem, Sylvia Plath expresses a desire to be in control. She feels she has to deal with a dangerous situation. At first she is not in control. She panics. She has a debate with herself and then she makes a calm decision.
Silvia Plath wrote this poem in seven five-line stanzas followed by a single line.

On one level Plath is simply recalling a personal incident. The story of the poem concerns a task with a bee box. In the first stanza she states that it looks like ‘square’, like a midget’s coffin, heavy and noisy:
‘such a din in it’. The word ‘coffin’ suggests death. The overall description of the bee-box is strange and disturbing.
In the second stanza, the bee box both frightens and attracts Plath. She stares in at the bees through a little wire grid. The box is ‘locked’ because its contents are ‘dangerous’. Yet Plath ‘can’t keep away from it’. She examines the box and considers opening it. But she is faced with the threat that what is inside may injure her. Yet, she feels she has to 'to live with it overnight'.
In the third stanza, she regards the bees as angry slaves that seek release and revenge: ‘Black on black, angrily clambering’. Through the wire grid she sees darkness. She imagines the bees are like army divisions of blackness that she associates with ‘the swarmy feeling of African hands’. She is in a state of alarm.
In the fourth stanza, the buzzing noise puts her off releasing the bees. She fears their bee language and now regards them as an aggressive Roman mob. She describes their language as ‘unintelligible syllables’. Her exclamation, 'small, taken one by one, but my god together!' reveals a fear of being attacked by these 'minute' [tiny] creatures. The swarm terrifies her.
In the fifth stanza she sidesteps the problem: ‘I am not a Caesar’. She means she is not all-powerful. She also means that she doesn’t have to understand the bees’ ‘unintelligible syllables’, which she would have to if she were Caesar listening to a ‘Roman mob’. Then Plath introduces a new image for the bees. She imagines that the bees are maniacs and that she can send them back:
‘I have simply ordered a box of maniacs’.
As her nerves steady, she realises she can starve them to death and ignore them:
‘They can die, I need feed them nothing’.
Maniacs are not as bullying as a Roman mob. They are far less threatening than an army of vengeful African slaves. Plath’s imagery shows that her state of panic is gradually reducing. At the end of the fifth stanza, Plath begins to feel powerful again, in a negative sense: ‘I am the owner.’
In the sixth stanza Plath feels different. She imagines the bees are ‘hungry’ rather than ‘angrily clambering’. Now she can see herself undoing the locks.
She realises the bees will fly to where they will get honey and leave her alone. They will ignore her, especially if she stands there like a tree. They will fly towards flowering plants:
‘There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades, and the petticoats of the cherry’.
In the seventh stanza Plath accepts her role as beekeeper. She realises she will wear her protective beekeeper’s ‘suit’ and ‘veil’. She seems to be coming to terms with her task. She decides she will release the bees, to allow them to find a source of honey. She also thinks they are likely to ignore her:
‘I am no source of honey so why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free’.
By freeing the bees she will be a ‘sweet God’ or a kind person. By being ‘sweet’, she resembles the honey that the bees are after, since honey is sweet. Will her sweetness make her attractive to the bees after-all? This is a play on words known as a pun. Through this pun, she reveals that because she has a desire to release the bees she is now sweet. This sweetness or kindness puts her in danger of a bee attack. At the same time she expects that the bees will look for flowers rather than carry out such an attack.
In the final single line, she states that the box is ‘temporary’ because she will release the bees in the morning. She concludes that the bees will not stay locked in the box.