There’s so much dancing but none of it makes sense. The workers are discordant. Their wing beats clash. It hurts to hear them. I wander through the endless combs, an entourage surrounding me. Every time I stop, they rush to my aid. Groom. Feed. Usher. But I feel their anxious song vibrate through the comb. The dancing makes no sense and I am not laying as I should be.
I’m a mother now, to several thousand larval bees, all curled in comb cells, fattening as they’re fed. But most of these bees are my sisters. Our mother left with a swarm a few suns ago to make another hive. We don’t know if they lived but it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that our hive should be at full strength now, bursting with my own daughters. But it isn’t. And the dance makes no sense. My sisters grow old and die an
