WORLD BOOK WORLD BOOK WORLD BOOK 0051 0051
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Chapter 3: RACES & REALMS
more than one entrance. All larvae are given the same
food before and during their pupation periods, as they
are still all the same. Broods are reared almost exclusively in an area of the hive called the “brood chamber.” Workers wrangle the queen into remaining in this
area at all times, as this keeps her safe from predator
attacks. What workers don’t tell the queen is that this
also prevents her from laying eggs in cells that the hive
would prefer to use for food preparation and storage.;
Once the queen lays eggs in specific comb cells, workers are compelled to rear them if at all possible; since
wax comb is time-consuming and resource-expensive
to build, Krikis would rather not have to keep making it
all the time.
Additionally, hive existence exhibits several common
practices:
• Comb Construction: Comb is built from wax secreted by glands on the workers’ abdomens. When
a Krikis finds itself with a crop full of nectar and no
place to store it, it begins producing wax, which then
triggers building instincts. Warriors must learn to
control this instinct or find themselves preoccupied
with building new hives.
• Hive Access: In general, field workers don’t have
time to walk or fly all the way through the hive to
the food stores to deposit nectar or pollen every
time they return from the field. Instead, they stop
at the hive’s entrance and pass what they are carrying to a house Krikis via their tongues, which allows
them to get back to the field much sooner.
• Population Variance: In the spring, a starting hive
population may be only 3,000 or 4,000 with a few
dozen drones, but good years can see hive populations soar to over 100,000 by late autumn. In the
landscape of the Hivelands, populated hives encroach on each other’s foraging grounds with expanded numbers. Competition for basic resources
increases and stays high from midsummer on
through year’s end when all drones are expelled
from the hives.
Behavior & Communications
Krikis use dance, pheromones, chemicals, and vibrations to communicate information vital to the hive’s
survival. Rapid tremors from a joint-clicking dance reverberate through the hive since all the hive’s parts are
cemented together. This allows other Krikis to learn the
location of food supplies and act on that knowledge in
an efficient manner.
Guard Krikis, a warrior subgroup, challenge all visitors
to the hive, smelling them for identity. If the visitor is
from that hive, its chemical “home” signature grants
entrance. If the visitor does not have that scent marker,
it will be challenged a second time and not allowed entry. However, if the foreigner has a crop full of nectar or
honey and makes an offering of it to the guard Krikis,
the foreign Krikis is welcomed into the hive as if she was
a sister, provided she is of the same color. Cross-color racial hatreds trump this exception.
In this way, hives can experience “drift,” through the
presence of Krikis in a hive with which they share no genetic relationship, but who work for that hive’s benefit.
Drift also occurs when Krikis wars claim prisoners. The
new Krikis is soon overcome by the scents of the resident queen and now believes that it has always been a
member of this hive, forever losing any memories of its
original home.
Some Krikis mimic other Krikis colors for specific gains
or to infiltrate enemy hives. Most often, though, smell
and chemical sensations trump color. But once it adopts
a particular hive’s scent, a Krikis cannot restore its original scent or shift to another; this, in essence, imprisons
the infiltrator Krikis in that colony. Spies face a terrible
choice, doomed to eventually join their sworn enemies.
Luckily, as noted above, many Krikis are overwhelmed
and entranced by queens, so ruthless warriors infiltrate
enemy hives with focused plans of sabotage or royal
assassination, dying in battle rather than losing their
mind to a new queen or hive.
Swarming to New Hives
Swarming is a hive’s way of reproducing itself. After the winter, the hive prepares to swarm during the
spring. Workers slowly backfill the brood chamber with
food, which in turn leaves fewer places to lay eggs, so the
queen begins to lose weight. Some new larvae trigger
to become new queens, and the house Krikis work hard
to keep the queen away from the nursery and the new
queens. Most often, only half the hive actually swarms,
while a newly pupated young queen emerges to rule
over the original hive.
By the time any new Krikis queens might be hatching,
the reigning queen has stopped producing eggs and
has lost enough weight to be able to fly again. When
she signals her intent to leave, roughly half of the hive’s
worker population fill their crops with food, and head off
in a mass exodus while scouts begin searching for a new
home. In the Hivelands, this almost certainly means a
confrontation with other hives and swarms.
A day after the previous queen’s exit, the new queens
begin to hatch. The first to do so locates the remaining pupating queen cells and stings each one to death
to secure her rule. Soon after that, the new queen takes
off on her one and only mating flight toward the drone
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