Extract from Dr Clive Sumner’s Field Report to the Cryborg Research DivisionOn the morning appointed for my initiation I went, together with Colin and Paul, the other two members of my cell (marginal note: Remember, the Maeterlincki’s social organisation is entirely apian. Z.B.), to the base of the granite outcrop.Colin cut and trimmed a long, hollow bamboo tube, whilst Paul prepared the sacred dust for ingestion. He broke open one of the desiccated hives, which had been abandoned by its colony.The hive was a great, tattered bundle of dried and flaking material with the texture of papyrus. It was roughly ovoid, but with a flat back, where the bees’ mucilage had cemented it to the rock. Paul split it open and invited me to examine the hive’s internal structure. This was unusual — to say the least — and it was at this point that I began to suspect that I was on the verge of an exciting and unusual discovery.The interior of the hive had the familiar structure of serried ranks of hexiform chambers, connected by minute passageways radiating from the central chamber of the hive, where the queen once resided. But within the hive a secondary structure had been constructed: a hive inside a hive.This subsidiary hive had the same hexiform chambers and minute passageways, but they were far smaller. These chambers were delicately positioned in the very interstices of the apian chambers. I asked Paul what had caused this. He directed me to look closely at one of these small chambers, which was no bigger than a quarter of a pinhead. Entombed within it was the perfectly preserved cadaver of a mite.Wringing the explanation for this phenomenon out of Paul and Colin was a tiresome business. As I have written above, the Maeterlincki lack much of the conceptual equipment that we take for granted and their language is devoid of certain key terms necessary for the description of social forms. But here is a paraphrase of my cell-fellows’ ‘Song of the Bee Mite’:These parasitic mites are quite unlike ordinary bee mites. Rather than infesting the actual body of the bee, they attack the structure of the hive, creating, as I had observed, a secondary hive. The Maeterlincki explained that this invasion was accompanied by a gradual shift in the hive’s social organisation. The normal and successful ratio between workers (sexually undeveloped females) and drones (sexually productive males) was reversed, so as to favour the development of more drones and fewer workers.Very gradually the hive began to succumb to parasitically induced decadence. Unless the queen and her remaining workers managed to summon the energy to abandon the hive and swarm, the hive’s economy became moribund. Eventually, all that was left was a dying queen surrounded by starving drones. It was as if the collective consciousness of the hive — if such an entity can be posited — had given in to a form of apian anomie.The Maeterlincki regard this process as a necessary part of their relationship with the bees. They couldn’t tell me for how long they had been harvesting the defunct hives, nor how they discovered the psychoactive properties of the dust made from the mites’ crushed corpses and sub-hives. Legend had it that in some previous dark age, the Maeterlincki had been beset by an abiding and terrible collective depression, a truly pathological boredom and lack of interest. Remnants of this pre-bee mite era remained embedded in their language (they have, for example, over twenty different words to express the concept of eyes ‘glazing over’).My cell-mates then made much of my own frequent bouts of apathy and tedium vitae. They urged me to cast aside my reservations and embrace the great spirit of the beehive.The bamboo tube was primed with the dust. One end was rammed into my nostril and Colin blew hard from the other. My other nostril received the same treatment, with Paul as the blower this time. We then did the same for Colin and Paul, rotating roles and nostrils. When we were done we returned to the Maeterlincki’s longhouse and life went on as before. Thereafter, for the duration of my stay, I was expected to ingest more of the mite powder on a daily basis.And what was the effect of this peculiar dust? To begin with I noticed nothing at all. Perhaps this was because I had been expecting something really radical, like the psychotropic drugs used by other Amerindian tribes: ayahuasca, yopo, yage and datura. But the bee-mite powder wasn’t painful as it was absorbed into the mucous membranes, nor did it produce nausea. There were no hallucinations, no sensations of a paradigm shift in either body, or ego-awareness.But over the next few days I began to feel more firmly bound into the culture of the Maeterlincki than before. Little things that they did, such as basket weaving, pottery decoration and cicratisation, began to interest me in a way that they hadn’t formerly. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I became like the Maeterlincki, but the idea that my mind was the dream of an individual bee did acquire a comforting sort of plausibility, in so far as spiritual beliefs go.During this period I conducted a number of tests on the mite powder, but I was unable, using my field-test kit, to analyse the active ingredient. It belonged to none of the major classes of psychoactive drug: narcotic, analgesic, hypnotic, sedative, stimulant or hallucinogen.