BEA (English Version)

BEA

The summer had already ripened, and innumerable buds of herbs and plants with their flowers of multiple colors covered the prairie. Wallflowers, jasmine, lilacs, mint and verbena, orange blossoms, thyme, apple, blackberry, dandelion, clover, goldenrod, lavender, lime, ivy, rosemary and many others made the delights of innumerable bees and other insects that competed for the succulent and sweet food that the season promised. Some flowers already showed the swellings that announced their becoming into fruits. Bees came and went from the combs attached to the branches of the forest's trees, carrying nectar in their cramped stomachs to share it with their peers from their hives. They also harvested pollen that attached to the villi of their legs, and loaded drops of water on their backs, necessary to moisten and keep the hives cool. It was a wonder of nature they could fly. According to the laws of aerodynamics, their bodies shouldn't allow them to do so. However, indifferent to logic, or because they didn't know they weren't supposed do it, they flew carrying almost their own weight with food for their colonies.

Faint columns of gray smoke far away showed evidence of small fires burning the hot prairie. However, that sector of the meadow and the neighboring forest were relatively safe, because the forest itself propitiated certain humidity that made the propagation of a fire difficult. The trees of the forest also contributed in keeping the place safe, by acting as a kind of wall that diverted the winds towards the meadow, moving any fire away.

A yellow stripped wasp watched the parade from the branch of a cypress tree, waiting for the right moment to warn its henchmen that a hive had been left without defenses, to attack and loot it. Its own hive was located in the middle of a wasteland, some distance away from the forest.

Its waiting paid off, for it noticed a large group of field bees going away from one of those beehives, leaving it unprotected. It was the expected moment. The wasp signaled to a battalion of aggressive peers that pounced at once on the hive.

The raiders subdued the scant defense of guardian bees and entered the hive, killing as many worker bees as they could. Their target was the cells where the pupae and larvae of that honeycomb's next generation of bees grew. If they could find the queen, so much for the better.

A group of those cruel invaders reached the royal honeycomb, where the pupae of queens' bees grew sealed in their cells. They immediately proceeded to pierce the wax seals and extract the helpless pupae.

The royal larvae fed on royal jelly, which made them particularly desirable for the queen of the wasps.

A whole battalion of defending worker bees managed to return to the hive and confronted the invader. Thousands of bees now faced a fight to death with the fearsome wasps. Many bees offered their lives for the cause of their hive.

However, they could do little. The damage was already done. The invaders fled away, taking with them hundreds of larvae and pupae of bees, and most bee princesses.

The leader of the wasps managed to grab two princesses' larvae. The unusual weight and their hauling made his escape difficult. A brave platoon of defense bees managed to entangle him with propolis and killed him. No bee noticed that one of the royal larvae carried by that fallen wasp landed by accident in one of the cells that had been previously occupied by an abducted baby bee. The other princess' larvae was immediately rescued and taken back to the royal honeycomb.

The colony of bees took at once to the task of rebuilding the hive. These attacks went on with relatively frequency, so the members of the hive already knew what to do in the aftermath.

"Remove all those dead bodies," demanded the queen bee pragmatically speaking in her pheromone language, and giving instructions to clean the hive. "Throw the corpses out to the forest floor. The ants will take care of them."