The Bee Dungeon

The light of the sun filtered down the canopy of a warm forest. The canopies of the trees, the shrubs and the bushes, and the ground itself were all covered in flowers of every shape, size, and color. The air was filled with the singing of birds and the buzzing of bees. Bees, butterflies, and pollinators of every sort flew from flower to flower.

In the midst of it all, Tarwantrad stood before a beehouse, carefully carved from the finest wood with flower designs adorning the walls. She smiled as she removed the roof and gently lifted one of the trays, watching the bees crawl all over the honeycomb and each other. She took her time looking over each brood cell she could find. Her smile grew as the queen flew out and danced a salute to her.

“You are enjoying the new home?”

The queen danced her confirmation. Tarwantrad and the queen then flared their mana slightly, moving the worker bees out of the path of the tray so that Tarwantrad could gently return it to its place.

Belissar’s Beehouse. That was a human name, if Tarwantrad wasn’t mistaken, and that had made her deeply suspicious at first. Tarwantrad hadn’t met one personally, but all the lore and the histories agreed that humans were wasteful, arrogant, and shortsighted, and had no respect or affection for the world around them. What sort of human would have ever taken the time and attention to make their bees happy?

But apparently this beehouse was approved by the God of Bees, so Tarwantrad gave it a chance. The results were…surprising. The trays were a neat and well-designed feature, allowing her to observe the inside of the hive without disrupting or destroying its structure. They had been carefully spaced from one another at the exact distance that the bees wouldn’t fill the gaps with either propolis or wax, allowing her to continue moving them and allowing air and bees to move through the hive with ease. Well, that would be a disadvantage during cold weather but worked well in the heat, and Tarwantrad could see spaces that could be stuffed with furs, cloths, or other linings to insulate if necessary.

For a human’s work, it wasn’t bad. The precise spacing of the trays told of close observations and continuous adjustments that must have taken a long time to work out, a kind of care and patient effort she would not have expected from someone so mortal. And more, the trays could be removed without damaging the rest of the hive, thus allowing a beekeeper to gather honey without destroying the hive completely. Tarwantrad did not gather much honey from her bees herself, but she could appreciate the desire to do so while keeping the harm to the bees at a minimum.

Most of all, the bees seemed to like them. As did the God of Bees, enough to name this feature for a human. So, if there was ever a human she would have liked to meet, it would have been this Belissar, should they still live.

Tarwantrad wrapped up her work on this hive and started preparing to tend to the flowers all around when she was suddenly interrupted.