Minibees

Minibees split from their ancestor, originating in Wallace and spreading to many landmasses thanks to topship fuzzpalms out at sea providing a source of nectar. They are significantly smaller than their ancestors, making them less conspicuous to predators and better able to access smaller flowers. They have shorter, rounder, more aerodynamic bodies, as well as more fuzz even on their carapace to keep them warm. The bulbous shape of the abdomen serves to raise their eyes enough to see in front of them. Their wings are optimized for forward flight, rather than backward, and the three front-most wing parts have tiny claws allowing minibees to shuffle on the ground and climb with ease. They are important pollinators, and have even taken over as the main pollinators for some flora due to their smaller size and climbing adaptations, but they have not replaced the xenobees.

The rods of minibee wings are flexible and can be bent by tendons inside of them, like the wings of other xenobees, but they snap back straight when relaxed. However, minibees have a locking mechanism that holds the tendon in place and allows them to stay bent when clinging to flora without getting tired. The sudden straightening of the wings can launch them into the air for flight. Taking flight can dislodge hairs, which irritate the eyes of predators, though they lack the poisons of their distant batworm ancestors.

The nests of minibees are located in trees and are made from silk and bits of flora. They often use wood and bark for the exterior to disguise it, while the interior might use a variety of leaves and crystal shells to produce floors and walls. The nests are expanded over time, and they sometimes have secondary nests either as an extension of the main nest or attached somewhere nearby in the same tree. Larger nests will have an open cavity where a minibee can comfortably fly in the middle. An especially popular nest location is within a tree hollow where they are well-hidden and most of the work is done for them. Inside the nests, they store honey and spores. When a minibee dies inside the nest, its carcass is dropped from the nest and usually falls to the ground to be collected by scavengers later. Their honey is usually yellowish because it is made using sugary nectar, unlike the green honey of their ancestors which was made using differently-colored compounds.

Minibees store honey, but do not exclusively eat it in that form. Instead, they mix it with the spores produced by many of the flora they pollinate to produce something resembling bread, which is easier to transport than either ingredient on its own. Social and altruistic, and with every individual being an important part of the colony and its gene pool, minibees will bring this bread to their young, sick, and injured, which will repeatedly lick the air to communicate their hunger. Rarely, they have also been observed offering bread to unrelated small fauna that they perceive as “injured” because of a similar gesture, such as the tongue-flicking of sweetworms, as the instinct to aid one another is strong enough to overcome species boundaries.

Minibees are hermaphroditic and mate several times a year. They are not eusocial, unlike the Terran bees they are named for. They typically mate while out foraging, having a preference for mating outside their colony to maintain genetic health, though they will mate inside their colony over winter. When a colony grows too large to gather enough food, it splits up, with many young minibees leaving to join with dispersers from other colonies to found a new one.

It is inaccurate to call the offspring of minibees, or of any xenobee or batworm in general, larvae. They are flightless, but technically do bear wings with underdeveloped membranes. As they grow, so too do the membranes, becoming more extensive by covering the chitinous wing rods in translucent skin. After an initial helpless stage where they must be fed directly, the juveniles are actually quite active and climb around the inside of the nest, unlike other batworms, exercising their wing muscles by hopping and fluttering around the nest. Flightless juveniles aid in caring for those even younger. They become capable of prolonged flight when they reach about two-thirds of their adult length after about 3 weeks, at which point they graduate to gathering food and live on for as long as 3 months.



There are many species of minibee, which are often colored such that they are inconspicuous in and around their nests. They generally depend on trees or shrubs as nest sites, but in the absence of these they can also nest on cliffs. Temperate and subpolar minibee species hibernate over winter. They do not stay asleep the entire time, however. They periodically wake up to mate and lay eggs, feed from their food supply, remove their dead, and patch damage to the nest, and their movement keeps the nest warm enough that they do not freeze. Species in the coldest subpolar, polar, and montane biomes often have longer, denser fuzz to keep warm and allow them to stay awake for longer during the year. Some species that pollinate floating flora nest on beaches and wait for food to come to them, at which point they go on a nectar- and spore-gathering frenzy which earns them enough honey to last until the next opportunity.