Who is The Melissa from The Fifth Sacred Thing and what is their importance?

The Melissa is introduced in Chapter 14. The Melissa is a woman who has merged with the bees. The bees are used as healing aids for the rebels in the hills. The bees are also very symbolic of an organism that thinks and works together, in unison. In the hive, the females are the workers and the leaders; this arrangement echoes the author's vision of a world in which men are no longer in power and counters the world of the Stewards where women are solely used for reproductive purposes (in the bee kingdom, it is the males, incidentally, who are used as such).