🅱️roven 🅱️ricling 🅱️ngie

Beatrice sat behind her desk, bobbing her head to the music booming throughout the room. As she clicked from camera A to camera B to camera C, and listened to her Bee Boys through her mental hive network, she started to feel something strange. It was like a tingle at the back of her neck, buzzing and beeping and blorping at her belligerently. After a moment she realized that the feeling was just Beter trying to get her attention over the loud music playing. 

“Beatrice, as much as I appreciate the Beatles, could you please play your music a little more quietly? I don’t like being ignored.”

“Yes, I’m sorry, Bud. What did you need from me?”

Beter gave a bit of an angry buzz before flying down to Beatrice’s keyboard and staring right up at her. “It’s going to be feeding time soon. They’re going to get upset if they have to wait extra time like yesterday.”
“Oh, buzz off with that BS, it was 15 minutes.”

“Yes, I know, but the other bees aren’t quite so considerate.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll get back out there in a minute. I just need to be sure whatever this machinery Derek is having installed isn’t gonna interfere with the hivemind.”

Beatrice clicked over to an email she had received just before she got to work this morning. Derek had told her that there would be some construction happening around the building, that she had to make sure the proposed locations for the new devices being added wouldn’t disturb any preexisting safety protocols or procedures, and that if she had any questions David would be happy to answer them. 

As it would be, it turned out that Beatrice did, in fact, have questions for David. Quite a few, for that matter. Despite how important it was that she knew everything about the machinery being put in, David was like a brick wall for getting answers out of. All she had managed to beat out of him was the fact that the machines being put in were epithet devices from the basement lab, and that they were supposed to link together to make the office work better in some way. She wasn’t buying it, but she also didn’t have the necessary bachelor’s degrees or lab knowledge to figure what was really going on.

Beatrice pulled out her phone, and began dialing the number for the lab. After a few rings, someone picked up. 

“Hi, this is Enedelia in the Gemini lab, what’s your favorite color?”
Beatrice got a very confused look on her face. “Uh… what?”

“Oh, sorry, right, I forget we’re working. You know when you have one of those days where you don’t really do much so you just browse facebook and you get so distracted you forget you’re being paid to be there?”

“Uhhhh… not really? Can I just speak to Reggie please? I need to ask him some questions about some machinery that’s being put in.”
“Oh, Reggie’s not here right now. Neither are Ray or Petunia or Martin or Steve or Thomas or Jason or Luis or patty or-”
Beatrice hung up the phone and just stared at it for a few seconds. That had to be one of the strangest phone calls she’s had in a long time. 

Beter started crawling up Beatrice’s arm to get back up to his usual resting place. “Well that was a bit odd, wasn’t it?” he asked as he crossed Beatrice’s elbow.

“A bit!? That bitch sounded like a nutjob. Anyway, if all of the real science boys are out of the office right now I might just have to send someone to check one of those machines before they get back. They won’t be quite as good as information from the source but it’s better than nothing.”

“Sounds like a good plan to me!” Beter said as he plopped down into his usual curl of hair just above Beatrice’s left eyebrow. As Beatrice walked down the hallway towards her apiary - and was greeted by several boisterously buzzing bees waiting to be fed - She signaled one of her worker bees to find one of the machines being installed and investigate it.  

Once Beatrice reached her Bee Yard, she was briefly swarmed by a metric buttload of bees, before she sternly told them to back off so she could actually get to the storage shed to get their food out. Once there, she lifted up a large bag of a nutrient solution (made of mostly sugar) and filled a 5-gallon bucket with it. She then poured that bucket into a large trough, and turned on a hose to begin diluting the solution to a point where the bees could actually drink it without bursting from the amount of sugar hitting their little bug-eyed bee brains.

While she waited for the trough to fill, Beatrice suddenly felt an urgent feeling come over the hive network. She perked up, as did most of her bees outside of the shed. She asked the hive what was happening, and a worker bee replied that the bee she had sent to investigate the machinery had been killed by it. For just a moment, Beatrice was in utter disbelief. After a second, she took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and tuned into what the other worker bees were seeing.

As it turned out, her bees were just a little bit stupid. The worker she had sent to find one of the machines had been ‘investigating’ it by essentially just batting at the wires with their hands, seeing what would happen. Not knowing the difference between a fully exposed and an insulated wire, they grabbed two bare copper wires, giving them enough of a shock to revert them back to their original bee form, and die from electrocution. 

Beatrice sighed, the bees around her mimicking her slow release downward. She disconnected from the hive and reopened her eyes to find the trough overflowing, and several bees standing next to the small stream that had formed, drinking as much as they could. She quickly shut the water off, added a little more of the solution to balance things out, and then wheeled the trough out of the shed so that the bees could begin feasting.

Once the swarm was set, Beatrice began thinking about the bee that had died again.

“I guess curiosity killed the cat on that one, huh Beter?”

Beter, between slurps of the sweet sweet nectar his queen has bestowed upon his kind replied “That isn’t the full saying, you know.”

Beatrice once again got a slightly confused look on her face. “What’s the full saying then?” she replied back.

“It’s ‘Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back’.”

This only made Beatrice more confused. “Why do you know that…?” she asked hesitantly.

“Sometimes I get bored, so I read books.”

“Books??? You’re practically as small as the letters, how do you even see well enough to read them???”

“Do you read by pressing your face right up against the pages, or are you a bit of a way back from it so you can actually see whole words at once?”

Touché, Beter. Touché.