Twilight and Fluttershy managed to get back to the shed before night."
"Okay... If you're sure, then go in. Just let me lock the door"
Another door? Was she serious?
"Oh... that's so they don't get out by accident. I told you I wouldn't let that happen, didn't I?"
Twilight worried about that. "Still.. They could get out through the walls, or ceiling..."
"I doubt it. You first... if you don't mind..."
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Twilight heard hundreds of parasprites buzzing. Looking around, there were dozens of cages on shelves, full of food, with strange labels.
"Fluttershy?"
Twilight tapped her hooves impatiently...
"Fluttershy? Hello..."
"Oh... there's around 237 of them right now, I think."
"You weren't kidding," Twilight said in astonishment. "Why would you keep this many of them?"
"Oh, right," Fluttershy began. "I had a conversation with the mailmare about bees... and then I thought that this might help with the problem..."
"Wait, what? I don't see what bees have to do with this?"
"Ummm... I was getting to that." Fluttershy said. "She named all of them, and was looking at the hive."
"Anyway, some of the bees she named had disappeared, and she was really sad, because she liked them. She was worried they had died."
Fluttershy continued, "Anyway, after she had a muffin, she cheered up a bit. She thought that the ones which were still there must have been a bit better at getting honey, or flying, or just lucky enough. It was almost as if Celestia had chosen the best of the bees... or so she said."
"And?", Twilight asked.
"So... you know how ponies look sort of like their parents, or pegasi usually have pegasi children, or earth ponies have earth pony children..."
"Okay... well, most of the time, anyway," Twilight admitted.
"So... traits of their parents might also be passed down from ponies to ponies, or from bees to bees. I'm not sure if any of the traits can change or new traits, but it seems to happen."
Twilight wondered where th"Okay... so what's all of this? Some sort of an experiment?"
"Umm.. sort of..."
Wouldn't it be better to use something that wouldn't destroy Ponyville to see how traits are passed on? Like, I don't know, Plants?
"Hmm... you might be right... but that wasn't really what i was trying to do," Fluttershy thought. "Besides, I don't do my own gardening."
"Wait, this is getting off topic. What could possibly be a good trait for PARASPRITES?" Twilight protested, "They're pests!"
"Right... anyway.... The problem with parasprites is that they.... umm... eat everything. That's pretty bad. When they're done, even they don't have enough to eat.
So I realized that if I could just encourage them to show restraint and reason with them, they should restrain themselves, so everypony could live together... It's actually been working pretty well.
I started by taking a bunch of parasprites, and putting four in each cage. Then, I gave them enough food for 6 of them. At the beginning... The cages were completely full... it was hard to deal with them... flying them back to the Everfree forest was exhausting.
I was so tired that I missed our meeting."
"Fluttershy!", Twilight said. "How would you possibly encourage the parasprites to reproduce less? That doesn't make any sense to me! You'd just have more of the parasprites which were bigger pests if you raised them."
Okay.. but that isn't all. I took the cages with the most parasprites back to the Everfree forest. Then, I took all of the parasprites, moved them to different cages, and put the food back in. That way, I'd eventually get the parasprites which didn't eat everthing in site.
"Okay," Twilight said, "so the ones you have left would have children less often, or later."
Twilight added, "but when you take them back to the forest, that won't change much. The wild parasprites show restraint? Wild parasprites wouldn't care, and would do better than them, and what you do wouldn't change anything."
"Actually, it does change their behaviour!" Fluttershy said excitedly.
Twilight couldn't understand what Fluttershy was saying by that. "Wait, what do you mean by that? What would make wild parasprites control themselves."