In the final months of her life in 1962–1963, Sylvia Plath wrote the Ariel poems including the celebrated Bee Meeting sequence, in which she used bees — insects capable of stinging, swarming, and being parasitised — as central metaphors for female creativity, oppression, and survival. Plath also kept actual bees at her Devon home with her husband Ted Hughes, giving the insect sequence an autobiographical grounding. The bees became figures for the dangerous collective, the male beekeeper, and the female poet's assertion of independence.

Plath's bee poems represent the most sustained and psychologically complex use of insects as poetic metaphor in twentieth-century American verse. While bees are not parasites, the imagery of stinging, invasion, and the body's vulnerability to swarms runs parallel to parasite poetry, and Plath's treatment of the insect-human relationship as one of dependency and danger was enormously influential. Her work opened the door for later confessional and feminist poets to use insect imagery as a vehicle for exploring power, gender, and bodily autonomy.