Creature seed: The Bee King.

Bee King – Google Docs

The Bee King

Bees, of course, do not have kings. So when bees encounter one, they tend to react about as horrified as a bee can manage.  You see, to them the Bee King is this horrible, enslaving entity that smells wrong and moves wrong and that can make regular bees grow weak and passively obedient and there’s nothing that can stop him.  The queens are helpless, the drones are helpless, the hive itself is helpless.  When the Bee King comes, the hive invariably becomes corrupted, and eventually dies.  And it doesn’t die easily; there is maximum suffering and misery involved, and the worst part is that there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to the destruction. All of which means that, to a bee, the Bee King is precisely the same sort of entity as Nyarlathotep would be to humanity.  

And to humans, a Bee King is this strange, sickly-looking mutant bee (you get those a lot) that’s a little larger than a queen bee, can barely crawl around, and that seems to have some sort of fungal disease that can wreck a hive if left unchecked.  Fortunately, the nasty things have no stinger, so if you find one you can just pluck them out of the hive.  It’s livelier than it looks, so it might try to get away; fortunately, the other bees don’t seem to care much if you do.  

 

What happens next is up to the beekeeper.  Regular beekeepers, uninitiated in the esoteric ways of the hive, simply just get rid of the Bee King and go on to the next beehive.  Enlightened, initiated beekeepers, on the other hand, take care to ritually burn alive the Bee King somewhere that the hive can see it. You can tell which beekeepers is which, because the second kind of beekeeper are the ones who can somehow unconcernedly go among the hives without wearing protective clothing.
Which makes sense: after all, would you attack Nodens, after He has banished Hastur from your city?