Belissar grinned as he made his way to the Flower Meadow with the rabbits. The First of the Fifth was one of the oldest queens and one he relied on heavily, yet she had declined to evolve with any of the special honey types thus far. Belissar couldn’t help but anticipate what she might become now that she was finally evolving.
As he imagined different possible evolutions for her, he arrived at his destination and took a look around with his Tower sight. He blinked. It hadn’t been that long since he enabled rabbits…and yet he saw them spread around the room already, munching on the flowers and digging burrows in the dirt. He had expected a handful at this stage, maybe ten at most…
Well, fortunately, he had asked the karnuq to check the room regularly and start hunting immediately once they noticed the rabbits, all on Tarwantrad’s zealous recommendation. A few of the karnuq archers were present and Belissar watched them for a bit. They seemed to be having a bit of trouble hunting out in the open and the rabbits noticed them before they could line up a shot more often than not.
Belissar couldn’t really help them with that, he had always relied on snares for his own hunting. Fortunately, he had already shared that method with them and the karnuq were apparently using both, so they had caught a few rabbits despite their struggles. Still, there were a lot more rabbits in the room than corpses.
But Belissar smiled. With how many rabbits there were in the room and how quickly they had spawned, he was now confident there would be an ample food supply for the butcher bees. It was time to add a new queen spawner.
Belissar made a short trip back to grab his supplies, then made his way over to the furthest corner of the room from the entrance and shortcuts. One of the hunters was just tossing a rabbit corpse there and saluted to him. Belissar, after discussions with Chief Rohsuak and Tarwantrad, had decided to designate this corner as the corpse spot, given that they would very much prefer if any undead rose as far away from the exits as possible.
Belissar greeted the hunter and confirmed the corpse here was being dumped and so free for his bees to use, then got to work building both a beehouse and a bee nest block before digging a small hole that could be converted to a bee nest. He had no idea which of those the butcher bees would prefer, but he intended to be prepared for any case. When he was done, he took a deep breath and turned to Niobee with a smile.
“Ready to meet some new bees?”
Niobee danced about happily.
“Ah. I see…could you wait a bit? I’ll try to see if I can flip them around.”
At first Belissar thought of just flipping the hive itself, but it seemed a bit flattened that way, and the legs were on the wrong side so it ended up at an angle when he tried to rest it on the ground. He gave up on that and decided to just build a new one from scratch. He referenced the spawner hive and tried to adjust the design to fit. He built it a bit more square than normal and with the grooves horizontal rather than vertical. He made the trays a bit thicker as well to account for the larger height of the wax pots. Fortunately, with the dry wood and tools from the karnuq he was able to make the trays and grooves fit more nicely than in his first attempts, so the house had no issue holding up the horizontal trays.
Belissar decided this was a good first attempt and waved the butcher queen to the house.
“How is this? Any more adjustments?”
The butcher queen flew inside and began crawling around the walls. A moment later, she crawled outside and began spinning about rapidly while making long buzzes with her wings. Belissar needed no translation to understand that response but the Tower gave one anyways.
“Amazing, incredible!”
Belissar chuckled at that. Flesh-eating or not, she truly was still a bee. He then held out his hand and waited for her to hop back on before carrying her over to the rabbit corpse.
“There should be a bunch of these in the room, you can hunt as many as you like. You can eat any that are dumped here for now but try to leave some if you can once you’re established. There’s also a mana flower patch over there…do you drink nectar from flowers?”
To his surprise, the butcher queen confirmed that she did. Belissar took a moment at that before he continued.
“Got it, you can drink from those then, or from any flowers in the room. Other rooms are fine too but you should ask the other bees living there first. Ah…and regarding hunting, please don’t attack the karnuq…or Tarwantrad…or the humans…or the wyverns…for now, how about you just stick with these rabbits and let us know if they aren’t enough?”
Fortunately, the butcher queen saluted at that…and then began spinning and buzzing about again.
“Amazing! Incredible! Big Queen is best queen!”
Belissar couldn’t help but chuckle again. Worries about flesh-eating bees aside, he was excited to help these bees grow too.
“Great. We’ll let you get to it, then. Just let me or Niobee or one of the other bees know if you need anything or have any questions. Ah, we normally gather each night, so we’ll introduce you to all the others later this evening if you’re done working by then. Let us know if you need to work on your hive today, though, we can always introduce you later.”
The butcher queen saluted and called him best queen once more before zipping off to the mana flowers and taking a big drink. Afterwards, she made her way to the rabbit corpse. Belissar watched intently, wondering what a flesh-eating bee would look like while foraging…
He decided his curiosity was sufficiently sated when she started tunneling through the eye of the corpse. Well…hopefully this meant he wouldn’t have to worry too much about whatever rabbit disaster hit Tarwantrad’s dungeon…