The Bee Dungeon

POBee 215.1 - Assem-Bee-ling Mobile Hives

The next day, Belissar began to set up the Death room Hesfalle had described. He made a new Flower Meadow on the karnuq floor connecting to door near the stairs to the other floors. He place a mana flower node and a basic poisonous herb node, then enabled rabbits in the room.

And after that…he was done.

For now, at least. He didn’t want to spawn the butcher bees until there were enough rabbits to feed them. Likewise, underworld phlox required death mana to even start growing, so he couldn’t plant those until they started hunting rabbits. Hesfalle did recommend adding poisonous plants…but besides the poisonous herbs none of the rest really fit. Subterranean deathcap were, well, subterranean, while the lava lotus needed lava, so neither of them were available. Vaporous hemlock could be planted if he added a pond…but Belissar was wary of filling the air with toxic mist. The karnuq and bees were supposed to hunt here, after all.

So, Belissar was done until the rabbits reached sufficient numbers to sustain butcher bee hives. He wondered how long that would take…

As Belissar went about his day, he noticed something peculiar. Worker bees constantly landed all over him, crawling over all parts of his body. They buzzed and hummed and occasionally bumped into and danced with one another. Belissar greatly enjoyed this, so he didn’t question it, content to watch the bees buzzing around him and occasionally offer them some magic honey.

The workers in question then went to report the nearest communer…

Back in the First of the Fifth’s bee apartment, the First of the Fifth’s Fourth Daughter’s antennae twitched as she felt a communer’s mana flow towards her. She spun about until she found the spot with the strongest mana flow to ensure she didn’t miss a single step of the communer’s mana dance. Once she had received the report in full, she began dancing and spreading her own mana.

“Leg too short, waist too wide. Bring closer!”

Before her, a buzzing cloud of workers shifted in response to her dance, piecing together bits of wax that they fused with their mana, cutting and trimming as instructed. Propolis sealed the gaps and reinforced potential weakpoints. Gardeners brought in as much pollen and resin as they could gather, which the honeypots converted to huge globs of mana-imbued wax and propolis for the workers to use. Communers and drones monitored the effort, the drones using their big eyes to identify inconsistencies with the desired measurements and the communers relaying the corrections.

Nearly her entire hive was at work here. Thanks to the recent boom in honey production, her queen mother had instructed her to focus all available efforts on this task, and the Fourth Daughter intended to do just that.

For what greater task could there be than building a hive in the image of the King?

The First of the Fifth’s Fourth Daughter was not the only queen working at this task, however. The First of the Fifth’s Seventh Daughter may not have lived in her queen mother’s hive, but her queen mother had taught her all that she knew. She built her hive with all of the diligence and excellence her queen mother expected of herself and all her children.

Though, she could not use any of the precise methods her queen mother had taught her, for her hive was…different.

All of her hive’s honey, rather than sitting neatly in organized cells, globbed together and flowed around her in a viscous mass. She had tried to separate and organize it at first, but she could only ever do so temporarily, all the honey mixing back together the moment she stopped paying attention to it. She had tried to separate the honeys entirely, but any that lost contact with the mass she swam in lost density and melted into pure liquid. The one thing her queen mother hated worse than mixing the honeys was wasting them, so she had quickly given up on that idea.

It had been a dark time as she had been forced to mix the honeys, but her queen mother had reassured her. The whole point of her birth had been to discover a new kind of bee and a new kind of hive, so her queen mother had not wished for her to rigidly adhere to the traditional methods. No, her queen mother had advised her to experiment and find her own ways of doing things, ones that were compatible with her unique characteristics.

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Even as she reminisced, a huge glob of honey slime came sliding into her palace. A soldier propelled the entire mass forward while honeypots floated within, processing nectar into honey slime on the spot. Their work was already finished by the time the glob reconnected with her hive slime, seamlessly combining their masses.

She had found that since her bees’ honey was their hive and they liked to carry both with them that she could move her honeypots around without any loss in production time. This had solved the issue with her workers moving more slowly than others, as they could move the nectar delivery point right to the flowers.

Still, all that had only made up for their disadvantages compared to the other queens. The Seventh Daughter was still trying to figure out if her unique characteristics provided any advantage. Slower bees that had to carry their honey with them, honey that couldn’t be separated from the hive without rapidly diluting, and an inability to organize different nectars were all heavy prices to pay, and she had yet to find any particular advantage worth all those constraints. Sure, she could move honey around as easily as commanding her children, but her queen mother could already move honey faster than her by just having a soldier carry the honeycomb. She could apparently fill parts of all of the honey with her venom, but maddening and the new toxic bees did the same without any special effort. She could increase her honey slime production by converting water into slime to mix with the honey, but extra diluted honey was not particularly appealing to her.

So far, nothing she could do seemed to justify all she had given up.

But she was nothing if not persistent, and she had something new to try. The King had granted them new knowledge to experiment with and so the Seventh Daughter set out to see if her hive could use it. It seemed to involve making wax structures. She paused and pondered for a moment. Her hive could make wax, but she hadn’t seen much of a point. Her children could grow directly within the honey slime and grew better that way, she couldn’t store the honey slime in cells, and she already had the King’s magical palace for protection from the elements.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Now though, she had a reason to try. She sent out a surge of her mana and the honey slime responded. The entire mass began to shape itself according to her thoughts. That, she supposed, was one of the few advantages she had. The honey slime itself acted as her own legs and wings, she could command it and any of her children within the main mass even more easily than her fellow queens could command their own hives. Within moments, the entire hive had reshaped itself according to the pattern in her mind.

Then, she commanded it to make wax. The other layer of the honey slime began to harden while compounds within the mass shifted about. The honey slime itself turned into completed wax and so the shape of the wax golem was completed in an instant.

The Seventh Daughter froze at this, staring at the completed wax structure for a moment. Having not attempted any wax structures after the first few honeycomb, she hadn’t realized she could do this. The ability to complete an entire hive in an instant, without any effort needed from her workers? That was powerful indeed…or would be, if she had any need for honeycomb. But it was a solid advantage, and for that, she was deeply grateful.

Her work was not done, however, so she refocused. The knowledge from the King stated that the creation of the hive’s form was only the first and easiest step. The difficult part would be to imbue the creation with mana and to form a self-sustaining core that would both maintain the hive’s structure and allow it to move. So, she stretched out her mana…

…and found that the wax was completely full of mana. It was still connected to her honey slime hive and her mana still flowed through it. She paused. Did this count as sufficient? She wasn’t sure, the knowledge implied the process should have required her workers to imbue mana bit by bit. But, well, the knowledge also implied the workers should have built the hive bit by bit and she had been able to do it all at once, so maybe it was fine?

In any case, the state of the wax seemed to match the end result the knowledge described, so she decided to attempt the final step. Forming the core that made the hive into a golem was the trickiest part, according to the knowledge. Why, it required a queen to learn how to treat mere wax as if it were one of her children…

The wax moved.

The Seventh Daughter floated in place, completely still for a moment. She gently told the wax to move again.

The wax lifted its arm.

…was she doing something wrong? This wasn’t hard at all, not anything like the knowledge implied. It was no different from moving her own honey slime.

She wasn’t sure but she followed the instincts granted to her by the knowledge. She told the honey slime to condense into a core that she embedded into the wax, which it did immediately, then she withdrew her honey slime from the golem entirely. She stretched out her mana and told the golem to move again.

The golem sat up as she commanded.

She…had done it? Just like that?

She stared at the golem for a while before her wings began to beat and swish the honey slime around her. She…had done it. By all metrics she knew, she had made a functional wax golem…in mere moments, and with none of the difficulties the knowledge warned her of.

Which meant…maybe she had an advantage after all.

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