The Day of the Nuptial Flight Read online

  * * *

  I was allowed to come and go amongst the fuzzipillars as I pleased. Because I wished to be close to my queen and attend to her needs, I tunneled near her chamber and remained there at night. When it rained, I blocked up the entrance the best I could, but water still seeped in. I swallowed the water in my dwelling and spewed it up outside, over and over until it was dry.

  As I accompanied my queen everywhere she went outside her chamber, I became a curiosity among her colony. Unlike my old hive, no one helped this queen. When she toiled like a common worker in the fields or collected leaves with a fuzzipillar, I was the one to lift giant stalks from the forest floor or pull the sickly plants from the ground. Even as she grew rounder, she continued to work, though her work outside became more infrequent and her work inside increased. Because her personal attendant would not permit me to enter the interior chambers, I watched through the clear sections of wall. I noted how she placed leaves, fruit, and nectar into a box, causing pictures of beautiful patterns to shine on the wall. Some of these items made the soft flesh around her mouth pull back and emit a high tinkling. Others caused her to crinkle up her face and shake her head. I was learning to decipher the minutiae of posture and the fluctuations in facial muscles when I could not smell her.

  One day as I worked alongside the Black-Eyed Queen, pulling scraggly plants and loading them in a container I would then carry back for her, the earth vibrated under our feet. My antennae twitched with glee. Even before she poked her head from the earth, I knew it would be a cow-worm. I chittered at her and she poked her head out farther. I massaged her with an antenna and she squirmed to expose more of herself.

  The queen cried out in alarm. Workers raced over. I hummed a song to let them know it was all right; the worm wouldn’t hurt anyone. The queen circled her arms around me, trying to tug me back. Perhaps she wanted the worm all to herself. It was her right. I backed away, bowing my head in apology. I waited for her to massage the worm and lap up the honey-sweat. Instead, the workers pointed what appeared to be a branch at the worm. Bolts of blue light shot out, searing the worm’s skin and cutting her into pieces. She shrieked in pain, quivered, and then went still.

  The scent of death hung in the air, rattling down my antennae and into my core. Why would anyone ever want to harm a cow-worm? They were cute like larvae with minds as simple and innocent as hatchlings’.

  There were other things I witnessed among my new hive that I couldn’t understand. When my queen’s ally, the Green-Eyed Queen, at last laid her eggs, my queen went with her and their attendants to a hill with dried little branches sticking out of the mound. I had long avoided this place as it reeked of death. They laid the unmoving larva within the earth and buried it, placing one of those dead branches above. Though the other queen was the only one who lamented in her high larva-like cries, the thickness of sorrow pricking my antennae came from them all.

  How odd that a queen should lament the death of another queen’s kin.

  As the months passed, the Black-Eyed Queen’s belly swelled. I discovered when my queen laid her eggs, there were no eggs, only a single larva. They buried my queen’s larva in the mound as well. Something was wrong with this tribe’s eggs if none of them lived.

  The Black-Eyed Queen no longer smelled of fertility. I was then struck with the realization I could no longer mate with her if she had no eggs for me to fertilize. I was neither able to serve as drone and future mate, nor as potential nursemaid. I left her for a time, examining the others in the hive. There were other queens, but they and their attendants did not want me. The Green-Eyed Queen became a queen again for a time. Her attendant permitted me to tunnel near her queen’s chamber. She gifted me with sweet morsels the queen did not eat. The attendant even permitted me to enter their chambers when the rain came and my tunnels filled with water.

  I came to realize more perplexing details about their hive structure. There were no chambers of drones or rooms where they stored eggs and larvae. The only individual the queen appeared to mate with was her single attendant. Could it be that these attendants were, in fact, drones? And did they only have one each? I spent a great deal of time studying scents and grouping them into categories of gender.

  If my observations were correct, there were drones who sometimes attended female workers, though sometimes these female workers appeared to attend the drones more than the other way around. Any of these female workers could mate with her drone at any given time. Doing so did not make the drone lose his genitals or turn him into a female nursemaid. Upon becoming fertilized, the female worker then became swollen with a single larva within her and she smelled like a queen. Though, in all my wanderings, I found not one larva anywhere in the colony.

  And with good reason. The human hive killed worms instead of milking them and used fuzzipillars for travel rather than to collect their regurgitated nectar. They would never become fertile this way. Humans were stealing our resources and wasting them.

  Though I began to decipher the meaning in various sounds they made—simple words and commands, “No,” or “Outside” or “Inside, Rover,” and “Good boy”—they were unable to grasp any of mine. They paid little heed to the teachings I tried to bestow upon them with the fuzzipillars. Not even Young Honey-Pot who was in charge of the stables—who I had now identified as an old drone.

  Though I often encountered the Black-Eyed Queen in my wanderings and she often greeted me with, “Hello, Rover,” and stroked my head, I did not return to her again until her scent changed back to that of a queen.

  I then spent the majority of my time listening to her words and attempting to repeat the ones she said most frequently: “Come here,” and “Follow me,” and “Eat,” and “A walk.” I realized the sound she made, “Juan,” was not “Wah!” a sound a larva made. This was how she called her drone. Though, sometimes she called him “you” and “my husband” instead.

  “Lara” was the word for queen that she called herself.

  When I repeated the sounds my queen made, she tilted her head to the side and sometimes laughed. When her drone wasn’t around and demanding her attention, she pointed to objects, said words, and made me repeat them. They came out garbled and trilled high and low but eventually I learned the words: chair, food, friend and fuzzipillar. She tried to teach me the word “love” but she pointed to too many things, including that vexing drone of hers, so I didn’t understand what it meant.

  The next time a cow-worm unearthed itself in the field of scrawny plants that did not belong on my world, I shook my head when she screamed.

  “Friend,” I trilled.

  She tilted her head to the side, watching me coax the worm from the earth and massage it.

  “Friend food,” I said as beads of honey-sweat formed on the worm’s skin. I lapped them up with my tongue.

  I stroked the worm’s belly with my antennae. “Baby food. Eat. Lara eat.”

  She shook her head, her way of saying no.

  “Lara food. Go.” I struggled to express the importance of fermented nectar but there were still so many words I needed to learn.

  I think the Black-Eyed Queen would have left the cow-worm alone, only her drone and another came over and used their bolts of light to kill her. If they kept up this rate of cow-worm murder, none of the hives in the area would have nectar for the winter.