Chapter 885: Green-Light Bees and Plants

"Hui Liu's side is showing some sincerity — they sent over two boxes of Chinese honeybees. Look."

Yang Jin sent the video to Xia Qing, letting her check on the bees' condition. Nominally, this batch of supplies was Hui Liu's compensation to the Azure Dragon Squad. To throw people off the scent, the bees had to be kept in Territory One first, and only "traded" to Xia Qing after the colonies split. So for now, Xia Qing could only watch the video.

In the video, a person in a protective suit opened the hive. Inside were two boards with neatly arranged hexagonal combs on both sides, hanging from the top of the hive down to the bottom. Xia Qing had taken time recently to study beekeeping and knew this kind of board was called a comb frame.

Seeing the person in the video lift out the two comb frames separately to display them, Xia Qing asked, "Only two comb frames per box — looks like about 3,000 bees. Is this a medium colony?"

Hearing Xia Qing ask such a professional question, Yang Jin privately congratulated himself on having done his homework. "After the bees evolved, their aggression and activity both increased. This number would have been a weak colony before the Catastrophe, but after the Catastrophe it does count as a medium colony. Most of Hui Liu's hives are this size. Nobody dares keep strong colonies now, because once the queen bee undergoes Calamity Evolution, a strong or extra-strong colony of 5,000-plus bees can attack humans under the queen's urging. Look — this one here is the queen. They say she's twice the size of pre-Catastrophe queens."

Xia Qing leaned in for a closer look.

If you only looked at the comb frames and the cells, you couldn't tell the queen's size. The bees had grown with evolution, so naturally the cells had grown too. But compared with the hand of the person holding the frame, the queen crawling slowly across the comb frame was visibly longer than a human's middle finger!

This one was even bigger than the worker bees in chestnut grove number forty-nine.

Xia Qing's eyes lit up a little. "The bees have grown, and their honey production has increased too. That's good news."

Yang Jin smiled. "Right, honey production has gone up, but so have the feeding costs. So edible honey is still very expensive."

After saying that, Yang Jin took four jars of honey from his backpack — two darker, two lighter.

He opened one of the lighter-colored jars first. "This is honeysuckle honey. At Hui Liu's base it sells for 3,000 points a jar. The real deal — very hard to get on the market."

A faint fragrance drifted out of the pale yellow honey. Xia Qing took a gentle sniff. "This scent is really refreshing and clears the head."

Xia Qing smelled the honeysuckle fragrance, but Yang Jin caught a faint medicinal scent from her. It was a very particular medicinal fragrance — Yang Jin was sure it was his first time smelling it. "Jin Yinhua's floral scent is fresh and rich, and it does have a refreshing, head-clearing effect. Hui Liu's side adds honeysuckle extract to two of their air filters to improve air quality. Of the six jars of honey Hui Liu compensated us with, two are honeysuckle honey and four are rapeseed honey — all green-light. I'll keep two jars of rapeseed honey?"

According to the terms Xia Qing had discussed with Yang Jin at the time, Yang Jin helped her get six jars of honey from Hui Liu — four for Xia Qing, two for Yang Jin.

Xia Qing opened the rapeseed honey and smelled it too, because she had grown rapeseed before and was more familiar with the scent of this flower honey.

Although each type of flower honey had its own advantages, honeysuckle honey had one extra function over rapeseed honey: detoxification. So honeysuckle honey of the same grade was a bit pricier.

Without Yang Jin, Xia Qing couldn't have gotten this batch of supplies. She wasn't the petty type either, so she directly gave Yang Jin one jar of honeysuckle honey and one jar of rapeseed honey.

Yang Jin had long guessed she would choose this way and accepted happily. He brought up Yan Long's recent situation. "Yan Long's special-ops squad has been dispatched to Gui Three Base."

Xia Qing asked, "Is the mission nature similar to the Zheng Chen squad Red Eleven sent into Third Brother's territory?"

Yang Jin shook his head. "The Zheng Chen squad's mission is to protect Zhang San and the lab's safety — they won't go out to fight. Yan Long's squad has a combat mission: they're responsible for eliminating Calamity-evolved sea beasts attacking Gui Five. This mission was one Yan Long picked herself."

Gui Five Base's geological conditions were very similar to Gui Three, which had already been swallowed by seawater, and that area suited Yan Long well. If she could return safely, she would surely become even stronger.

Yang Jin saw the worried expression on Xia Qing's face and knew what she was thinking, but he didn't offer any unnecessary comfort. Instead, he shifted her attention. "Tomorrow Brother Luo will fly the helicopter over. He'll stay in the territory for a few days and teach you aerial sniping techniques."

The Azure Dragon Squad had gotten two helicopters — one kept at the Azure Dragon Squad headquarters in the safe zone, one in Territory One. To make the helicopter in Territory One more legitimate, Yang Jin and Xia Qing discussed having Beard Feng's squad take on the task of regularly patrolling the northern Evolution Forest.

As Beard Feng's "girlfriend," Xia Qing could of course hitch rides on the plane in her free time, heading to the northern Evolution Forest to learn flying, parachuting, and aerial sniping techniques.

Hearing that Luo Pei was coming, Xia Qing was overjoyed. This made Yang Jin feel a twinge of jealousy. He coughed and asked, "If you're keeping bees, what plants are you planning to grow?"

Xia Qing understood at once. "Captain Yang got beekeeping flowers from Hui Liu?"

Yang Jin smiled shrewdly. "Mm, I bought honeysuckle and wild banzhi saplings, plus beggar-ticks seeds — all green-light. Want to buy some?"

Great minds really do think alike.

Ever since Kuang Qingwei and Qi Fu proposed keeping bees last year, Xia Qing's allies had been discussing in the lord channel what plants to grow for the bees to forage on outside of rapeseed bloom season. Among the plants they chose were these three Yang Jin mentioned.

In the Catastrophe years, wild plants came in mixed red, yellow, and green grades, and the honey gathered by free-ranging bees was very hard to keep consistent in quality. So the edible honey at every base was made by bees collecting from the flowers of shed-grown plants.

Since they were shed-grown, they couldn't pick tall woody plants — only short herbs, shrubs, or vines with controllable plant height that had flowers rich in nectar and long bloom periods. And they had to be green-light plants.

To produce green-light honey, the plants grown had to be green-light, and the bees gathering the nectar to make the honey also had to be green-light. If either the plants or the bees were yellow-light grade, the resulting honey would be yellow-light or even red-light. This was the main reason edible honey was so expensive during the Catastrophe years.

Jin Yinhua is a vine, blooming from May to October. Wild banzhi is a subshrub that can grow over a meter tall, blooming from September to January. Beggar-ticks is an herbaceous plant, blooming from August to September. These three plants, together with the rapeseed already grown in the territory that blooms from February to April, could ensure flowers for the bees to forage on all year round in the territory.

Seeing Xin Yu's flower room already had green-light honeysuckle, and the territory alliance squads had found green-light wild banzhi and beggar-ticks during their group outings, Xia Qing had already gathered all three plants.

Moreover, Xia Qing had already scattered a large patch of beggar-ticks seeds in the breeding greenhouse where the rice seedlings had been raised, and planted over forty green-light wild banzhi plants.

But of course, the more green-light plants the better. Xia Qing pulled herself together and asked the man sitting across from her — Broken-Waist Wolf's older brother — for a price. "I do need these three plants. What price is Captain Yang planning to sell at?"