Chapter 3: RACES & REALMS more than one entrance All larvae are given the same food before and during their pupation periods, as they are still all the same Broods are reared almost exclusively in an area of the hive called the “brood chamber.” Workers wrangle the queen into remaining in this area at all times, as this keeps her safe from predator attacks What workers don’t tell the queen is that this also prevents her from laying eggs in cells that the hive would prefer to use for food preparation and storage.; Once the queen lays eggs in specific comb cells, workers are compelled to rear them if at all possible; since wax comb is time-consuming and resource-expensive to build, Krikis would rather not have to keep making it all the time Additionally, hive existence exhibits several common practices: • Comb Construction: Comb is built from wax secreted by glands on the workers’ abdomens When a Krikis finds itself with a crop full of nectar and no place to store it, it begins producing wax, which then triggers building instincts Warriors must learn to control this instinct or find themselves preoccupied with building new hives • Hive Access: In general, field workers don’t have time to walk or fly all the way through the hive to the food stores to deposit nectar or pollen every time they return from the field Instead, they stop at the hive’s entrance and pass what they are carrying to a house Krikis via their tongues, which allows them to get back to the field much sooner • Population Variance: In the spring, a starting hive population may be only 3,000 or 4,000 with a few dozen drones, but good years can see hive populations soar to over 100,000 by late autumn In the landscape of the Hivelands, populated hives encroach on each other’s foraging grounds with expanded numbers Competition for basic resources increases and stays high from midsummer on through year’s end when all drones are expelled from the hives Behavior & Communications Krikis use dance, pheromones, chemicals, and vibrations to communicate information vital to the hive’s survival Rapid tremors from a joint-clicking dance reverberate through the hive since all the hive’s parts are cemented together This allows other Krikis to learn the location of food supplies and act on that knowledge in an efficient manner Guard Krikis, a warrior subgroup, challenge all visitors to the hive, smelling them for identity If the visitor is from that hive, its chemical “home” signature grants entrance If the visitor does not have that scent marker, it will be challenged a second time and not allowed entry However, if the foreigner has a crop full of nectar or honey and makes an offering of it to the guard Krikis, the foreign Krikis is welcomed into the hive as if she was a sister, provided she is of the same color Cross-color racial hatreds trump this exception In this way, hives can experience “drift,” through the presence of Krikis in a hive with which they share no genetic relationship, but who work for that hive’s benefit Drift also occurs when Krikis wars claim prisoners The new Krikis is soon overcome by the scents of the resident queen and now believes that it has always been a member of this hive, forever losing any memories of its original home Some Krikis mimic other Krikis colors for specific gains or to infiltrate enemy hives Most often, though, smell and chemical sensations trump color But once it adopts a particular hive’s scent, a Krikis cannot restore its original scent or shift to another; this, in essence, imprisons the infiltrator Krikis in that colony Spies face a terrible choice, doomed to eventually join their sworn enemies Luckily, as noted above, many Krikis are overwhelmed and entranced by queens, so ruthless warriors infiltrate enemy hives with focused plans of sabotage or royal assassination, dying in battle rather than losing their mind to a new queen or hive Swarming to New Hives Swarming is a hive’s way of reproducing itself After the winter, the hive prepares to swarm during the spring Workers slowly backfill the brood chamber with food, which in turn leaves fewer places to lay eggs, so the queen begins to lose weight Some new larvae trigger to become new queens, and the house Krikis work hard to keep the queen away from the nursery and the new queens Most often, only half the hive actually swarms, while a newly pupated young queen emerges to rule over the original hive By the time any new Krikis queens might be hatching, the reigning queen has stopped producing eggs and has lost enough weight to be able to fly again When she signals her intent to leave, roughly half of the hive’s worker population fill their crops with food, and head off in a mass exodus while scouts begin searching for a new home In the Hivelands, this almost certainly means a confrontation with other hives and swarms A day after the previous queen’s exit, the new queens begin to hatch The first to so locates the remaining pupating queen cells and stings each one to death to secure her rule Soon after that, the new queen takes off on her one and only mating flight toward the drone 49