I can only assume that some kind of cull is occurring each night, with those found to be imperfect or underdeveloped or underperforming in some way being removed to make way for new workers. There seems little other explanation, although what imperfections the dead creatures may have exhibited is hard to fathom. Certainly, investigations of the bodies have revealed no obvious flaws or deficiencies.
May 3rd: The hive is proving increasingly difficult to manage, even under optimal daytime conditions. The bees are extremely aggressive and defensive, and although they eventually calm under the influence of the smoker, their activity in the period before the soporific takes effect is somewhat unnerving. The bees begin, as would be expected, by trying to sting me, but seem to learn extremely rapidly that their primary weapon is of little use and cannot pierce my protective clothing. Then, they begin to cluster around the seams of the clothing, especially at the wrists and neck, and also across the facial netting of the helmet. It is almost as though the bees know to block my vision by gathering thickly across the material. Sometimes, the weight of the bees on the net is so great that it is forced close to my face and my vision is filled with naught but brown fur and stings and I have to shake the net clear of the creatures before I can carry on. In higher animals their clustering around the seams of my clothing might be taken to indicate an understanding of how it is designed and where its weak points exist, but in bees this is, of course, illogical. They almost certainly gather there simply because they are the areas that offer them the greatest purchase. Still; it is a strange coincidence.
Another strange thing: the hive seems ready to produce another swarm. There are definite signs that a second queen is being matured by one group of the drones, and she is already bigger than the larvae in the surrounding cells. This is, of course, extremely early for a second queen to be developing, and must indicate further evidence (if it were needed) that the Northern Wild Bee is ideal to introduce into the ecosystem of Britain. Such speed in new swarm development will allow for a greatly increased production of honey and wax, and shows that already this experiment is proving to be successful.
There followed several pages of diagrams showing the bees, or parts of them, from a variety of angles. One picture caught Brabbins’ eye and he sat for a moment staring at it. In it, Holmes had carefully illustrated a dissected bee, using arrows to neatly label particular pieces of it. By one thing (which looked to Brabbins like a twisted balloon), Holmes had written, Poison sacs. Beneath this were a series of figures, the most noticeable of which was third in the list: 23% larger. 23% more venom, the ability to sting repeatedly, increased aggressiveness; Christ, what had Holmes done here? thought Brabbins, and then, because he had no other option, he read on.
May 9th: It is not a second queen. Since hatching, it has remained in the hive and shows no inclination to either challenge the current queen or to form its own swarm and seek to establish its own colony. Rather, it seems to have removed some of the duties that were previously carried out by the existing queen, who seems to have been relegated to a simple breed production role. Whilst it is impossible to know how bees communicate within the hive, by observing the new social hierarchies developing it has been possible to ascertain that the new creature appears to be in control. It spends far longer than the queen engaged in complex interplays of movement and touch with the drones and warriors, whereas the old queen is rarely approached now apart from feeding rituals.
May 11th: The new creature continues to grow, and although it is not as large as the queen, it is now considerably larger than the other inhabitants of the hive. The queen continues to be a presence and have a role in the hive, producing egg after egg, but she is clearly no longer the driving force behind the hive’s activities. She is fed and her occasional needs are attended too, but that is all.
May 14th: I have come to a startling conclusion: the new creature is not a queen, but a king. Long thought a myth, the Northern Wild Bee appears to allow the development of a king bee as well as a queen in its society. The king, slightly physically smaller than the queen, takes charge of the day to day running of the activities and of the work undertaken, controlling the actions of the workers and guards in a way that previously had been the responsibility of the queen. This will bear watching carefully, as it may indicate the advent of a new stage in the rearing and cultivating of bee societies.
May 19th: The bees have killed a dog. I would scarcely have believed it if I had been simply told, but I watched the incident occur, and I trust the judgement of my own eyes. The animal, a local farm dog, I believe, was in the field when I went to make my morning observations of the hives. As I checked my Western Honey Bee hives, it played around my feet, obviously hoping for reward. Upon my approach to the new hive, however, the bees started to gather in a black cloud in the air above us. At first, I thought this might be the emergence of a swarm, and that I had been wrong about the king; that it was simply a queen and that what I had observed was simply an unusual, more complex, process by which new queens are hatched and become independent. However, I was wrong.
The bees fell onto the dog with a noise like the shriek of a saw stuck in wet wood. One minute, it was at my feet, happy and panting and canine, and the next there was simply a mass of bees, so many that the shape of the dog was lost below. It howled, once, a terrible sound of pain and confusion that rose in pitch before it was cut off. The animal had its mouth open, its tongue covered in bees, all thrusting down with their stings, their abdomens clenched and pulsing. I used the smoker, to no avail; the bees seemed to have achieved some kind of blood lust, a rage that allowed them to shake off any effect from the smoke. When I tried to knock the bees off the dog, to give it a chance to run, they performed their usual activity of clustering in my visor, blocking my vision. They were so thick about my arms and head that, although I could not feel their stings through my clothing, the weight of them was obstructive, preventing me from moving my arms effectively, and causing in me a claustrophobia, as though I was under water with no hope of surfacing.
The bees, once the attack on the dog was over, left me. That the dog was dead was obvious when the bees rose, as though to one command, and flew back into the hive. The corpse they left behind was terrible. They had managed to puncture the dog’s eyes, blood and ocular fluid had spattered down the sides of its snout, glistening and staining its fur in dark streaks. Its tongue had swelled to the size of a bull’s so that the sides of its face were pushed out, and pink flesh emerged from between its teeth. What I saw of the gums showed that they had stung it there and, although its fur may have offered it some protection, its flanks bulged with poison. It had voided its bowels in the extremities of its fear and pain and the smell of it was strong and foul. Over that smell, however, was another, the olfactory equivalent of the strange, bitter aftertaste of the honey produced by the hive. When I went to move towards the hive, the cloud of bees reappeared and although they did not attack, the threat was clear. I left my field in a state, for the first time in my life, of terror.
May 20th: Following the attack on the dog, I have found myself carefully considering the facts of this most curious of cases, and the fears that it has raised in me. The dog posed no threat to the bees, yet they attacked anyway. The assault was swift, unforgiving, unprovoked, and merciless, and whilst it may have only been a stray farm dog that took the brunt of the savagery on this occasion, I cannot guarantee that this will always be the case. I am beset by images of a child from the village, or a farmhand, or Mrs. Roundhay one day straying too close to the hive and raising the bees’ ire. Without the benefit of protective clothing, they would be killed as surely as the dog was, and I am tormented by visions of a person, the bees clustered about them as he lies in the field by the hives, his flesh swollen and blackened, and the smell of venom hanging in the air around them.
The vision does not end there. Past the dead on the ground, in the distant fields and in the woods and eaves where bees make their homes, I saw new hives being constructed, some by man and some by the bees themselves, their ordered waxen combs containing worker after worker, each equipped with a savage and pitiless sting and with venom that burned. I saw, somewhere deep in these hives, the gestation and birth of new kings, each as violent and aggressive as the other, and I heard an inhuman buzz fill the air. It is not just the regrettable incident with the dog that has caused these visions, however, but another thing. In my tending to the other hives over the past weeks, I have noticed an increased aggressiveness in the bees and, this morning, I found in two of them the larval stage of the king bee.
I have little choice now. I shall study the hives carefully for the next day to ascertain when activity in them is at a minimum and the risk at its least, and then I shall burn them and all of their inhabitants. My experiment has been, in the strangest way, too successful, and is at an end.
Brabbins put the papers down. The last of them was dated the day before Holmes’ death, and he wondered how it had happened; had the man approached the hive without his protective clothing? No, he was clearly not stupid. Had he underestimated the bees? Brabbins thought that perhaps he had, and had paid for that underestimation with his life. He had treated them as something limited, mere insignificances to remove but not to regard warily, neither intelligent nor able to plan. They had known what was coming, somehow, and had attacked
