Chapter 17 - Warrior Bees

We didn't have a map of the territory, but I knew Foragers didn't fly farther than half an hour away from the hive.

With their speed roughly estimated at 60 kilometers/per hour, it meant that the hive's "territory" was a circle around 30 kilometers in radius.

Good thing I still could remember the formula to calculate the circumference of a circle.

2*3,14*30=188. 188 kilometers or 3 hours of flight.

6 hours if the flight was slow enough to look out for ants and other threats, as well as take rest stops.

For every part of the territory border to be patrolled at least every 10 minutes during daytime, we'd need 35 patrols. 40 to be sure.

Each patrol could have just 10 bees—enough to deal with wasps and ants. Which meant I needed 300 Warrior Bees in total. Plus spares, so might make it 400.

'This is more doable than I thought. I feared I would take more bees from other duties and our food production would tank even more.'

〔Border Patrols〕 

Brainpower requirement: 13

Allows establishing your territory. 

Increases chances of noticing outside threats to the colony beforehand. 

Allows opening and closing borders. 

〔〕〔〕〔〕 

I was a bit bummed that a technology had no stat bonuses.

'As long as we have food, it won't matter!'

I went to organize everything.

Despite the earlier incident with irreverent Builder Bees, my authority inside the hive has really grown in the past month. The Foremen Bees I taught have taught respect toward themselves and me to their peers. Smarter bees liked to talk and spread rumors about how smart I was.

That was what I chose to believe they were talking about behind my back.

They *definitely* loved me. And no bees *whatsoever* thought I was "ill in the head".

But I still asked for Ambrosia's help to get 400 recruits among younger (and not just smarter, but more long-living) bees. Then I temporarily removed 30 Foremen Bees from their duties and told them to train these recruits how to swing their hammers. Just that, nothing more.

They didn't *have* hammers, so they trained with sticks. Meanwhile, I urgently went to my Sergeant Craftsmen and told them to pause the training of new Craftsmen Bees so they could make 400 hammers.

Three days of rushed work later, 400 hammers were made, and the future border guards could swing them the right side toward the enemy.

But by that day, despite Foremen Bees' efforts, the hive lost 7 more units of food!

〔Resources〕: 

> Food: 64 units

> Building materials: 9 units

In a grim but determined mood, I gathered all these bees together on the hive cave floor and arranged them into rows of ten.

They stood and watched me with curiosity. With how similar they all looked, and with hammers in their hands, they looked like some general's ideal of soldiers.

"First, from now on, each of you will be not just whatever worker you were before, but a Warrior Bee above all!" I declared.