The Spider's Web

In "The Spider's Web" the author, Leonard Kibera, tells a story about a man named Ngotho who is a servant for two white people. The man and woman are married and Ngotho seems to see all of their interactions and dissects them in his mind. Ngotho cannot stand being the servant to these two people as is evident in the opening of the story where he is imagining being dead and buried inside a wooden coffin. I interpreted Ngotho's thoughts to mean that he was suicidal over his job. There are multiple references in the story to "The Queen", which I assumed was a reference to the wife in the story, Mrs. Njogu. I was, however, very confused when the thoughts about "The Queen" also seemed to include bees in a hive. Although Ngotho spent much time thinking that Mr. Njogu should be more of a man and stand up to his wife, I had a very difficult time finding where the bee metaphor fit in exactly. Perhaps the reader is supposed to draw on the similarity between how a bee hive is run and how this particular household seemed to be run. That is to say that "The Queen" of the bee hive is the boss in the bee community as was Mrs. Njogu within her own home. The very end of the story ended quite dramatically I thought, when Mrs. Njogu slaps Ngotho across the face and he retaliates by stabbing Mr. Njogu in the thigh. Then as a consequence of his violent act, Ngotho heads off to hang himself with a rope. In essence, the story comes full circle because Ngotho was originally thinking about suicide when the story began.