Apiony

"I saw these on my first trip through the Barrier Mountains. Friendly little critters, I hear they sting but never saw it myself. I've faced down thousands of enemies on hundreds of battlefields, but I have yet to muster the courage to ask where the honey comes from. It's tasty, though." ~Margrave Arronax Skinner, Elector of Cambreath

Basic Information

Anatomy

Apionies look like a meld of particularly fluffy ponies and honeybees. Like most creatures created by Biomancy, there is a lot of variation between individuals even in the same bloodline. As such, in broad strokes they are roughly the size of large ponies or small horses, with indistinct faces and covered in a long, soft fuzz that fluffs out in every direction. They are yellow with black stripes or black with yellow stripes, and they walk on hooves. The ideal speciment has four legs, but they can vary from two to nine, they may have a mane that erupts haphazardly from the fuzz, or more or less distinct faces than usual. Hidden in the fluff of their tail is a wicked stinger. This stinger holds no venom, but it injects a potent acid when it penetrates. Queens are almost double the size of the members of their herds. They periodically sprout and shed large, colorful wings.

Genetics and Reproduction

Apionies are mostly sterile, with one 'queen' being fertile. She reproduces asexually, laying periodic clutches of eggs when she consumes the correct type of honey. The herd will produce this honey when their numbers have dwindled.

Growth Rate & Stages

The eggsacs of apionies look like blobs of honey in which large round pearls of amber are suspended. A clutch of eggs will be anywhere from two to a dozen eggs. When the eggs hatch, a caterpillar comes out. These resemble fat, woolly worms that the herd will feed honey to. After a few months of growing fatter, they'll be nearly round and begin 'sweating' honey. This honey solidifies into amber, and inside of this amber coccoon they will change into their adult form. Bursting free of the amber, they will begin their lives. If the previous queen has died or the herd has grown too large, the other apionies will produce a royal jelly to feed one of the larvae. This one will become a queen. If the previous queen is still alive, she will lead some number of the herd elsewhere to establish a new herd.

Ecology and Habitats

Apionies are most at home in the lowland valleys between mountains, though they have little problem on treacherous mountainsides. Wild herds are rare, and have therefore not yet spread beyond the Barrier Mountains, and the relative lack of density in the Noblewhite Blossoms from which they primarily make their honey makes the Great Grass Ocean and the Hopewell Badlands both much less attractive to them.

Dietary Needs and Habits

Apionies make honey in a false stomach by drawing pollen out of flowers (preferably Noblewhite Blossoms) and sap from the Wyvernbane Tree. They draw the pollen out of the blossoms by rubbing their faces on them, lashing them with a long, soft tongue. For the tree sap, they beat at the tree with their hooves until thorns break off, leaving weeping wounds on the tree. They then drink their fill. The pollen and sap mixture combine with enzhymes in their stomachs, which rise like a yeast. They then extrude the honey in globs two to three feet across. A given herd will typically dig out a 'honey bog' lined with wax for the purpose, and all the apionies in a herd will use the same bog for the entire herd, with a 'barrel' pit set aside for the queen. The barrel pit is given priority and will always be full, even if the other apionies go hungry. They produce three kinds of "special jellies" in addition to the normal purple jelly that they produce for eating.

Behaviour

Apionies are generally docile creatures, and will learn a friendly humanoid's scent and become comfortable with them with relative ease. They have little in the way of prey instinct, and each herd must learn about a predator's nature before they know how to react. The exception to this is Wyverns. Apionies know and despise Wyverns immediately on smelling them, and will flee if they can and fight them if they can't. Apionies in a few miles of each other can 'smell' complex experiences of one another. They leave scent trails from glands that coat their hooves, they can 'learn' from consuming honey from another herd, and they produce subtle scents that convey complex information. This has the effect that, when a herd is close enough together, they can coordinate instinctively with each other. They lose themeselves to the herd and can act as one entity. They can also offload some thinking in this way, with the effect that the more apionies gather in a place, the smarter they become.

Additional Information

Domestication

The people Fort Hopewell have domesticated several herds of apionies for use as beasts of burden as well as to produce honey. While they prefer Larghe hounds for protection, they do like to ensure that the herds stay close to the outskirts so any raid by Wyvern or Greenskin may result in the production of Furylings.

Uses, Products & Exploitation

Royal Jelly - Ensures that a larva will grow up to be a queen. This is a deeper purple than the regular honey, and is thicker in texture. It's the primary diet of the queen, and it's known to have restorative properties if consumed by humanoids. Lonely Jelly - A blue jelly that induces the queen to create an eggsac to expand the herd. It's so named because apionies typically make it when their herd has dwindled. It's used as a fertility drug and aphrodesiac. Panic Jelly - A red jelly that apionies will produce if they're in immediate danger. They will 'spit' it at their larvae, who immediately begin transforming into Furylings. Consuming it is toxic to humanoids and will cause mutations and psychosis. Hopewell Aspirants sometimes tip their arrows with it to cause havoc among Hobgoblin Legions.

Perception and Sensory Capabilities

Apionies have eyesight that extends into the ultraviolet range, and a sense of smell that can detect pheremones on the level of near mind reading. These smells are how they communicate to each other, and one apiony can tell what another apiony is experiencing for nearly 8 miles, half if upwind and double if downwind. This allows for an eerie congruence in the herds as they act in concert with each other.