[3 days later…]
Dr Jenkins’ life had gone to hell over the past few days. Until recently he had been an ambitious, confident and rightly-feared man. Now however he had been reduced to little more than a sentient egg factory, constantly wishing that his miserable life would just end.
Certainly the last three days had proven to be very educational for the former doctor. The freshly-bred queen had been escorted to a simple hive that had been constructed inside a small wooden box on the wall of the Greenhouse.
By normal bee standards the hive was in a state of utter disrepair. The space was a mess, with collapsing cell-like structures lining the walls and debris piled up on the bottom of the nest. There was clearly a distinct lack of worker bees given that the hive had been so poorly maintained, and this also indicated that there had been no queen actively replenishing the hive’s numbers for quite some time.
This certainly helped to explain why the queen had been welcomed so openly into the colony. However, the former doctor would quickly come to realise that being a queen bee wasn’t quite as glamorous as being a human one.
For starters, Jenkins was constantly surrounded by female workers who acted as her servants. One of their main duties was to clean their queen so that she was always in peak condition. This quickly became irritating since it meant that the she never got a moment’s peace as her servants clambered over her, attentively licking her all over.
However, this constant attention was not nearly as uncomfortable as the feeding process. Given that Jenkins was physically unable to digest her food, she instead had to be fed by her attendants.
First, a worker would reduce the queen’s meal into a disgusting gruel. Then Jenkins would have to suck up this disgusting mixture by connecting her proboscis to that of her servant.
Jenkins initially tried to avoid this sickening process by refusing to eat. However the members of the colony knew they needed a healthy queen in order to survive, and they were willing to go to great lengths to achieve this goal. To that end, whenever Jenkins refused to cooperate, a small swarm of drones and workers would surround the disobedient queen and essentially force feed her the nutritious meal.
After several shows of resistance, Jenkins decided that it was less traumatic just to accept her food willingly. Soon she was gulping down the pre-digested sludge as if she had been eating it her whole life.
Ultimately it was essential that Jenkins got used to this process quickly since she was essentially being fattened-up before she started laying her eggs. On average she was being fed three times an hour so that she had a healthy supply of nutrients to sire the hive’s next generation.
After two long days of doing little aside from eating, the new queen finally started to perform her true purpose for the hive. Acting purely out of instinct, Jenkins moved to one of the delicate cell structures attached to the wall of the hive. Without really thinking, Jenkins lowered her abdomen into the empty structure before laying a tiny white egg in the small space. Her attendants then tended to the freshly-laid egg whilst Jenkins moved on to the next cell.
The whole process felt completely alien to the former man. She could feel the egg leaving her ovary before passing through her oviduct and insectoid vagina. Stranger still was the fact that she could choose whether to fertilise these eggs using the sperm supply that her various mates had provided. Given that the hive needed workers, she instinctively knew to fertilise a large proportion of them.
After laying her twentieth egg, Jenkins’ human side had already decided that she’d had enough. She tried to fly away, but her annoying retinue forcibly prevented her from doing so as they swarmed around her. Before long Jenkins’ spark of resistance had been snuffed out and the instincts of the queen took over again.
Now that she was back under control, the queen was released. She could have tried to break free again, but the chances of actually escaping seemed to be virtually nothing. Ultimately, Jenkins decided that it was probably easier to cooperate for the time being. As a result, the reluctant queen moved on to the next cell before releasing her twenty-first egg.
This process continued fairly continuously for the whole day. The only times Jenkins got to have a break were when she was being fed, and strangely she came to look forward to these brief moments of respite from the near-constant laying.
By the end of the day, no less than 1,000 eggs had been deposited throughout the hive. Jenkins felt utterly exhausted from her long day of laying. The inner passages of her oviduct and vagina felt sore from all the eggs that had been squeezed through them. She just wanted to collapse and fall asleep.
Regrettably however, the other members of her colony were having none of it.
Jenkins was presented with another disgusting meal before being forcibly ordered to keep laying.
By this stage Dr Jenkins had had enough. He just wanted his body’s instincts to fully take control. But no matter how hard he tried to give in, his will to survive kept him alive against his wishes. His only comfort was that he knew some instincts had very short lifespans. If his body kept going at this pace then he’d surely be worked to death in a matter of days, right???
And so Dr Jenkins clung to this last shred of hope, tragically unaware that she could expect to reign as the hive’s monarch for several long years to come.