The Ardent Swarm by Manai Yamen

Author:Manai, Yamen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542020473
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2021-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

18

Sidi placed his head next to the jar.

Since its capture, the black hornet hadn’t stopped flying, banging body and stinger against the glass walls.

“What aggressiveness!” marveled Sidi.

Even though he had found those responsible, he didn’t know anything about them.

He had observed their bodies of exaggerated proportions, their reconnaissance technique, and their attack plan. None of it was familiar to him.

He knew the local flora and fauna, and yet he had never seen this species before. Hornets this size couldn’t have been lying in wait all these years and, as a queen breeder, he knew that evolution was a slow and tortuous process. Nature couldn’t have birthed such a monster overnight. This hornet undoubtedly came from somewhere else. It had traveled.

Sidi had been equally attentive to the behavior of his bees toward the aggressors, and he had quickly understood that they were completely vulnerable to this unprecedented menace.

He thought back to the scene of destruction and the bravery of the drone bees.

Normally, the drones served only one purpose to the hive. Their essential mission was to fertilize the queen during her nuptial flight, and as soon as the empress was satisfied, the worker bees unceremoniously chased the drones out of the kingdom, letting them die of cold and hunger. A sad fate, he had often thought, when he collected their dead bodies at the end of summer.

On the other hand, in the event of an attack, the drone bees formed the first line of defense for the citadel.

Since the new queens he’d introduced had been impregnated, he knew that the worker bees were already planning to expel the drones. In a way, they were already doomed.

By letting them confront the hornets, he had offered them the chance to distinguish themselves on the field of honor without endangering the colony’s survival, and in the process given himself the chance to note with his own eyes the nature and actions of these barbarian insects.

But the drones had been powerless before the black hornets.

He’d also wanted to see how the other bees would react to the attacks. They were crazed, and yet, they didn’t retreat. Their desperate counterattacks, as individuals or in tiny groups, had had zero effect. They didn’t know how to defend themselves from these monsters, he had noted before ending the massacre.

“Where are you from? How did you get all the way here?” he murmured to the hornet thrashing around the jar.

The day had ended without further conflict, and when he saw evening come and his girls return to their hives as usual, he felt reassured. The hornets were in fact diurnal insects, and, until tomorrow at least, he would be granted a truce. He needed to use this time to his advantage. He needed to think. He set his mind to work, pacing in his hut, at times scratching his head, at others pulling on his mustache, turning in circles like the hornet in the jar, colliding against the invisible walls of his ignorance, until he collapsed in exhaustion alongside his tireless guest, still trying to pierce its glass trap.

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