5 Facts About Honey Bee Society That Could Be Applied to Changelings · 2:38am Jun 13th, 2013
So, I keep bees, as some of you know. I have two hives right now.
I was at my local beekeepers association meeting tonight, and I got to thinking about interesting things I know about bees that could be used for some cool stories/world building about changelings.
All we really know about changelings are that they’re insect like, and they seem to have a queen/worker structure. Now, that describes a lot of insects, and there may be some with a more evil/interesting society than honey bees have (honey bees have a symbiotic relationship with their food source, and aren’t aggressive unless they think they’re being attacked.) But I happen to know about honey bees, so I thought this might be interesting for people who don’t.
Or maybe you’d just like to know some stuff about bees. Either way.
1) Any egg in a beehive can be made a queen, if the bees feel like it. Queen eggs are exactly like worker eggs, they just get fed royal jelly as they grow. This decision is made by the worker bees, not the queen. The chosen eggs grow into queen larvae, then get turned into a queen cell (which looks like a hard little cocoon, as opposed to workers, which look like normal comb topped with a flat shell.)
If a queen dies, or is getting old, the workers get moving on making a new one. If the queen is strong enough, she’ll kill the larvae before it hatches.
Story seed: So, while Chrysalis is off invading Canterlot, it’s entirely possible the worker changelings were instituting a back-up plan. If Chrysalis doesn’t get back to the hive in time...
2) The queen is the only bee in the hive that lays eggs, and she only leaves the hive once (usually, we’ll get to that) to get mated. Mating once sets her up for life. But almost every other bee in a hive is female- so who does the queen mate with?
Meet the drones. Drones are male bees, and they do nothing. They can’t sting, they can’t collect pollen or nectar, they can’t make honey and they can’t take care of the young. They live in the hive most of the year and have literally one job in life- find a virgin queen and mate. But where do they find a queen?
The drone bar, of course. Every day, the drones leave the hive and go someplace nearby, where they meet up with all the drones from other nearby hives. This is called the drone bar. They hang out at the drone bar all day, every day, waiting for a queen to show up. When she does, they all try to mate with her, then she flys back to her own hive and they wait for another one. At night they go home, eat, and hang out with no job to do.
This sounds like a pretty sweet deal, and it is, until fall. When the bees start closing up shop for the winter, the workers don’t need a slacker like a drone around, so one day the drones come home to find their way blocked by the guard bees at the entrance. They aren’t allowed in, and since they have no way of getting food, and no hive to live in, they all die. Next spring, the bees make some more drones.
Story seed: Drone changelings, possibly kicked out of their hive with no place left to go. Or, a character could stumble upon a drone bar that they never realized was a drone bar, until a queen shows up. Also: drone bar just screams clop fic.
3) Once the queen is mated, she starts pumping out eggs. A lot of them. A queen can lay more than her body weight in eggs every day. As time goes on, there are more and more bees in a hive, with more and more honey being stored. So what happens when they fill up all the room they have available? One group of bees will eat as much of the honey as they can. Then they, along with the queen, will swarm.
A swarm is not a bunch of bees flying around defending the hive. It’s a group of bees who no longer have a hive, but have a queen with them to set up shop somewhere else. They usually land someplace a ways away from the hive, and look like a massive pile of bees crawling all over each other until one of them finds a good place for a hive. They’re usually very docile, they have nothing to defend, until they find someplace to make a home. Then they get pissy, because the pissyness of bees is directly related to how stretched their resources are. When they have a hive full of honey, and can get more easily, they’re pretty friendly. When they have absolutely nothing, they're also pretty friendly. But when they just enough for themselves, either because they haven’t had time to build it, they’re running out of honey, or they can’t get more in the winter, they’re little striped furies with stingers.
Back at the old hive, the workers who are left start feeding a bunch of eggs some royal jelly, trying to make a new queen. If that works, and a queen hatches and mates, there are now two separate hives.
Story seed: Chrysalis’s invasion has all the hallmarks of a swarm that’s started to build a hive. This could mean that they actually have noplace to go when they’re kicked out, and that there’s another hive somewhere with a brand new queen.
4) Bees will rob the hell out of each other. If they find a hive they think they can take, they’ll basically go to war, with masses of fighting bees flying around the hive, and bees crowded around the front defending the entrance.
If the robber bees get in, they’ll rip apart everything, eat all the honey, and leave the place decimated. They take the spoils of their battle back to their own hive, leaving the other hive with a slim chance of survival.
Story seed: While ponies seem to be a peaceful society, there’s plenty of room in Equestria for changeling wars, if there’s more than one hive.
5) There’s only ever one queen in a hive. If the workers decide that their queen isn’t doing a good job (usually because she’s old) and they manage to raise a queen without their current queen noticing, the newly hatched queen fights the old queen to the death. Whoever wins is now the queen of the hive, and the workers support her... until next time.
Story seed: So how much does Chrysalis trust her workers? And how would ponies deal with a new queen, who may have different ideas for her rule?
Feel free to use any of this. If you have questions, I’ll try to answer, but I’ll warn you that I’m not an entomologist, just a person with some boxes of bees in her backyard.
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Insightful as always, Jake.
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It's funny. I love entomology and nothing here was new information to me, but I never connected this sort of information to changelings. Now I have all these changeling story brainworms wriggling about.
...The Drone Bar is rather tempting, but it isn't really my style for erotica. Wonder if I could twist that kernel into something that is my style. Hrm.
Dammit, no! I have 28 stories to write for the VitSoL challenge as it is! AUGH!
This... this is gold for Changeling fics.
6. You said bees have a symbiotic relationship with their food source(flowers), right? But what if Changelings do a roll in keeping Equestrian society healthy?
One possibility: Much like bees transfer pollen from flower to flower, Changeling infiltration actually spreads love around. They'll often go after ponies who are having a bad relationship(easy targets), and replace the loved one they are on thin ice with. They end up "making things right" with subtle mind control and shape-shifting to harvest that extra-special "new" love, and when the real pony returns the love then goes where it should(and then they can harness that residual love).
This way, they keep the flow of love strong, and their food source "fat and happy."
Going further, Celestia knew about Changelings, but never expected for them to attack because that would be counter-productive for both species. Sure, they'd have a lot of love all at once, but all that'd be left is despair as they have no way to replenish it.
NO! NO! NO MORE STORY IDEAS!!
All right but how long would it take to train an army of bees?
I personally thought of changelings as being more like termites (inasmuch as I thought about it), though I don't know that much about insects in general so it's not like that was a well-formulated idea.
But this was just a fascinating read. Probably one of my favorites, among your blog posts. A little bit of this I knew before, but most of this is new info to me—and if I may say, you did a wonderful job communicating it. I don't normally find things like this all that interesting, but it's usually pretty dry and doesn't give quite as much agency to the bees themselves. Leave it to an author, I suppose.
In any case, these are wonderful ideas. I've never had much interest in writing changeling stories, but if I ever do, I suspect I'm going to be working very, very directly off of these ideas. So...
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I have to admit, I have never read one of your stories. I literally follow you just for your blogs, and this one is definitely one of your best. Learned more about bees than I would ever think on a pony website.
Also, I come here for your discussions with 1141085 .
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(Go read "Best Young Flyer"! It's in the Pony Fiction Vault, and—me whining about Ch. 6 aside—it's really, really good. I'm bad and I need to read a lot more of bookplayer's stuff myself, but you really shouldn't miss out on that!)
So... you are in effect, saying that changelings are a eusocial society?
I thought this had been established...
I...had no idea about any of this. I didn't know bee society was so intricate. Like, I knew they had a queen and everything, but all that other stuff was news to me. I feel like I'm ten again watching Kratt's Creatures.
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Yes, but see Ladyhart21's comment below this. Many people don't know the details of how those work (and they work differently depending on the species, anyway.) I thought some of the details might be interesting to people.
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The name of the insect your looking for, that does that, would be ants. Some species herd aphids and protect them (supposedly, but I've heard of the ants disregarding that and being douchebags) from predators so that the ants can consume the honeydew excreted by the aphids. Some other different species of ants do a similar thing with mealybugs.
Anyways- most of the principles put forth by the OP would still apply anyways, since ants are also eusocial insects.
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yeah... being a bio major and an amateur entomologist has a tendency to make you assume people know things about insects...
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Bad Horse had a short story on gDocs that was fairly close to the aphid interpretation, but it wound up being a palette inverse with the ponies and changelings basically flipping roles. I'm not quite sure where it went, but if I can turn it up I'll post it. It's... quite dark, though.
Yeah... this has given me ideas...
DAMN YOU BOOKPLAYER!
I already have too much on my plate as it is!
Question: What's royal jelly? I'd google it, but I really don't want to be bombarded by pictures of bees. They're fascinating, but I'm not a fan of actually looking at them.
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It's a secretion bees make, with all the nutrients needed for a growing bee (think of it almost like milk is for mammals). All the larvae actually get a little bit of it, but when they want a queen they just keep feeding. (The hive's queen also eats it, to aid in egg production.)
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I took a look at the Wikipedia page (which shows two larvae in cells, but will not bombard you with bee pictures), and I just had to share this:
The active ingredient in royal jelly—the one that causes the larvae to develop into queens?
"Royalactin"
Science, you are my hero.
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Ah, sometimes science is just the best thing. Did you know that the scientific name of the western lowland gorilla is Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla? Saying that out loud makes me crack up every time.
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That is wonderful.
I don't really have anything else to say, but I felt I needed to say that.
Well, and to say "Gorilla gorilla gorilla".
So you're implying that crystalis and her changelings might have been a swarm who wanted to set up hive in canterlot?
geez. Now i got even more crazy ideas
Bees are utterly wonderful, fascinating creatures.
Are you aware of the waggle dance they do?
I donno why but I get a Wasp vibe from the Changelings more aggressive
This was really interesting stuff. I had no clue about half of those things.
:Headcanon has been expanded:
OK, now:
This is synchronicity. I'm about halfway through my novella Calling You in which Cadance uses her love magic to selectively breed a race of assistants from a colony of magical bees she finds in the Everfree Forest just after her aunt Luna has been banished to the moon. These assistants, of course, turn out to be the changelings...
Mike
The Drone Bar.
I read that, and immediately visualized a group of unemployed drones sitting around drinking whisky hoping that some sort of meaning to their life would just wander in...
Not sure where I'm going with that, except it involves whisky.
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Maybe I'm just too nerdy, but I keep being surprised no one has suggested this in the context of a P.G. Wodehouse Jeeves & Wooster crossover...