Reincarnated To Evolve My Bee Empire

"Yes, Father. They have rebuilt most of the ships you've destroyed—they worked almost as hard as bees! But…" Blessing smiled mischievously. "But they won't actually do it. My sisters are working on it even now, I know it. Humans already fight each other all the time, but my sisters make even more strife! Our Lieutenant had this idea as soon as we found out about the crop famines humans faced…"

'Were insects eating crops in the Vardish Empire without bees to protect them?' I asked.

"No. It was the other way around! Their crops were killing all the insects!" Agent Blessed waved her hands in agitation. "I've never seen anything like it. The pillar mountains, the trees, even the grass—they all could be deadly out there. Some of them would catch insects and dissolve them alive in acid. Others were just incredibly toxic. Humans complained that they couldn't use wheat they grew themselves because the bread made from it killed half the people who ate it."

'What? Agent Blessed, I hope you saw a lot of these plants, because I want to know all that you've seen!'

This was incredible. In our continent, the insects were steadily winning the evolutionary race. In places not guarded by bees, most of the plants were eaten by insects, rodents or larger herbivores. Those, in turn, were eaten by predators, and these finally died from hunger… to be eaten, too.

These waves of overpopulation lead to the extinction of the entire species. Areas of land were turned into barren plains where only the toughest, spikiest plants grew.

But it wasn't a problem for the Bee Empire—if everything except for bees died, this means we would be left without competitors!

It was a shock to find out that on the other continent, plants were winning the evolutionary race!

They grew deadly spikes, toxins, acids and even weirder abilities. Some plants from the Agents' stories even learned how to walk over the ground instead of standing still!

"Humans are fighting the plants and each other. They won't bother us until we decide to come to them," Agent Blessed concluded.

'Thank you for your service, Agents,' I said. 'You did an amazing job, risked your lives… Oh, I wish astral projections had hands so I could give you headpats—they are the least you deserved!'

The Agents smiled at me. A few blushed, but most took the praise boldly and proudly.

"We can still know that you wanted to give us headpats, Father!" one of them said.

"Tell us what else to do, we will do it—easy! We can go back to Vardish, right now!"

I chuckled and shook my head inwardly. Since we didn't have a telepathic chain to the other continent, someone will have to run back and forth with messages, but these Agents?

'You deserved a vacation—and to catch up with what happened in the Empire in your absence. Report to your superior and tell her that for the next month, you can do whatever you want. Take an assignment you like or just do things for leisure… As long as you relax.'

On this note, I left the happy Agents to plan their most leisure activity (which probably meant another mission of spreading propaganda among humans) and returned to my body.

***

It was a relief to find out that the Vardish Empire will wait for us for as long as necessary, but I feared that the plants living there might not.

There were also all the creatures living in the ocean… This was too scary to even think about. I hoped they would be too busy eating each other to try going on the land.

In the meantime, I knew that I must improve our methods of travel over the sea—for the sake of the Agents working hard on the other continent.

Bees didn't build ships larger than river boats with steam engines. They moved quickly over water, but on the sea, they won't survive a single wave!

Human ships were larger, but much more technically primitive.

'That's it, we need massive steamships! Except… Why deal with steam engines when we have oil now?'

Researchina was already developing a gasoline-powered combustion engine to put on our mechas! She just needed versions of it for trains and ships.

Which she did in record time! More than that, we began building much larger train tracks—human-sized ones.

This would take much longer than smaller train tracks. Human workers were slow compared to bees, and we didn't have enough mechas for all the projects that required them.

But new ones were built every day now. Thanks to the radio, their controls also improved, and now fewer people were necessary to crew them. This led to an overall improvement in mecha performance, since there were fewer people to make mistakes.

In a few months, the first human ship was refitted for a gasoline engine and proudly went out into the sea—with a speed that shocked its own sailors!

Around the same time, Researchina showed me the first pieces of synthetic rubber and plastic.

I put a massive amount of resources into spreading these inventions over the Bee Empire. Massive chemical facilities were built one after another. Thousands of litres of toxic waste were poured into rivers.

And this was not a careless decision! I gave orders to poison fish on purpose! People were told not to drink from the rivers with toxic waste, and I made sure that these rivers weren't the sole source of water for affected regions.

This all took time—two years passed just like that, and the next development level wasn't even close. The edges of the Bee Empire spread so far that some of our regions had cold winters and snow!

Several harvests came and went by this point—both in the Bee Empire and on the other continent. I got several more reports from Agents in the Vardish Empire, telling about the ongoing war between humans, humans and plants.

Then I got a much more concerning report…

"What? An entire sub-hive got food poisoning?"