POBee 196.1 - Royal Bee-solve
The First of the Fifth was silent as she returned to her hive, giving commands to her workers by habit alone. She could not help but admit that this recent turn of events had left her shaken.
The taste of the Queen of All Bees’ honey had been, well, divine. There was no other way to put it. And the First of the Fifth knew that she could not compare her own honey to that, for what bee could compare with the Queen of All Bees? She could only take pride that the Queen of All Bees had judged her King worthy of receiving the divine honey itself.
What had shaken her was the realization of just how deep the quality of honey could go, and how little of it she had fathomed. She had grown content with her current production, believing it fit for the King, when she had barely scratched the surface of what was possible. She had grown complacent, taking the King’s love and favor for granted since she had learned he loved all bees. She had been content to stop growing, thinking she had reached the peak and had nothing more to do than to help others climb to what little heights she had managed to reach.
Oh how wrong she had been.
What shook her about the ambrosia was not how much better it had been than her own honey. What shook her was that her instincts whisper that it was possible to approach those heights. Yes, there was something fundamental missing that would prevent any bee from pulling it off, no matter how much they grew. But her instincts told her, that in addition to whatever that fundamental quality was, that she was simply too weak to even consider evolving with divine honey.
And that made her realize just how far the queens of the King had to go, for none of them had managed to grow in recent times. They had their one growth spurt that enabled soldier spawning, and then not one of them had changed since. What queens had evolved had merely taken on specialized types of mana and adapted to specific environments, but none of them had fundamentally changed what they were.
Compare this to the other types of bees. Workers could evolve into communers, gardeners, and honeypots. Soldiers could evolve into sprayers, lancers, battlecasters, or archers. Even the drones had found a role far beyond what their original purpose, and the First of the Fifth wondered if even they might one day evolve.
But not the queens. Not the bees with the most important, most foundational role in any hive. All of them, from the valiant warriors of the Flower Meadow, to the innovators of the Orchard, to the honeymakers of the Apiary, had managed to grow past their initial limits. In that regard, Beero, the queen who was not a queen, might actually be the most deserving of the title among them. She, at least, had earned her authority by her own achievements in exceeding her limits.
This would change. This had to change, so the First of the Fifth resolved. The hive of hives could not be held back by its own queens. They could not be content to remain the only bees that never changed. It was their obligation to put in at least as much work as their own workers and soldiers.