“It has everything to do with you,” Queen Bee said. She motioned to her killer bees on the other side of the room. “My Royal Army bees brought me the tech from your lab before they destroyed it. But even after tearing everything apart, I couldn’t figure all of it out. Then I realized: Why should I work at this when you can do it for me? So”—she leaned forward and stared hard at Bumblebee—“tell me your secret.”
“Tell her, or she’ll get mad!” Cuckoo Bee whispered loudly from time-out. “It’s no fun when she gets mad.”
Bumblebee struggled to digest the information. “You want my secret so you can shrink?”
Queen Bee let go of a long laugh. “No, not me. Why would I ever want to get small? As it is, I’m undefeatable. I’m brilliant, I got top grades in school, and I’ve got venomous stingers and my slumber dust.”
Bumblebee could feel anger rising inside her. “Your slumber dust is crippling the world by killing all the crops!”
Queen Bee blushed. “Why, so nice of you to notice,” she said. “Disable, distract, and conquer. As for me shrinking—no, no, no, no, no, I have no desire to get small. I want your technology so I can reverse it!”
“What?” Bumblebee asked. Was she hearing correctly? “You want to get…bigger?”
For a brief second, Bumblebee was distracted by the images of her parents on the wall. They looked lost. She noticed that the number of “tour guides” seemed to have thinned out.
“Not me, silly,” Queen Bee said, looking amused. “My Royal Army. Imagine giant mutant killer bees. They’re a threat when they’re small, but as giants, they’d be a conquering force capable of subduing the world!”
“And what about your BotBees?” Bumblebee asked. “Them too?”
“Them? No,” Queen Bee said with a dismissive wave. “BotBees are servants, not warriors.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” said Bumblebee. Evil could be so confusing sometimes.
“Argggh!” Queen Bee cried, leaping up from her throne. “Don’t they teach you anything at Super Hero High? Logic this out: one, my Royal Army is made up of giant mutant bees; two, they will take over the world; and three, everyone works for me, their wonderful queen. Is that so hard to fathom?”
On the wall, Bumblebee could see her parents. The BotBee was still videoing them, but they had somehow become separated from the Royal Army. Are they lost or have they escaped? she wondered. And either way, are they in any less danger?
Pleased with her own diabolical plan, Queen Bee was still rambling on. “As you know, each beehive has its own queen. But with me in charge, I will not only be the queen of all the bees, I’ll be queen of the world!”
Watching her parents, Bumblebee felt a slight twinge of hope. With her mom and dad safely away from the Royal Army, she could fight Queen Bee!
“Did you like what you saw at Super Hero High?” Bumblebee asked, stalling while she formulated a plan.
A slash of a smile crossed Queen Bee’s face. “It hasn’t changed all that much….I used to be a student there.”
“But you took a tour…,” Bumblebee began. She stopped herself. “You were there to—”
“Meet you,” Queen Bee confirmed, nodding. “Why would I need to find out anything about Super Hero High? I practically ruled it when I was there.”
“Tell me more about it,” Bumblebee goaded her. She needed time to think.
“Ah, the memories,” Queen Bee said wistfully.
“So you went to my school?” Bumblebee asked.
“No, you go to my school,” Queen Bee snapped. She leaned back in her throne. “I was just like you once, only smarter. You do your school assignments yourself, but I got others to do mine for me. And it was at Super Hero High that I learned to love bees!”
Thanks to a BotBee camera, Bumblebee could see her parents wandering alone on the streets of Bialya, looking lost and worried. But at least this seemed to confirm that they had become separated from the Royal Army “tour guides”!
Queen Bee was lost, too…in her own story. “I was so in love with bees,” she was reminiscing. “Everything bees! Beehives! Honeycombs! Spelling bees! Anything bees! I started the Bee All That You Can Bee Club. Is that still there?” She didn’t wait for Bumblebee’s answer. “After I left Super Hero High, I knew that it was my mission to protect the bees. I mean, there is so much adversity out there, one needs to be careful.”
As Queen Bee continued, Bumblebee turned on her comm bracelet. She tried to relay a message to Batgirl with her coordinates, speaking softly and quickly, before turning it off again to conserve power.
“…so I began protecting the bees,” Queen Bee was saying. “Taking them under my wing. Making sure they weren’t working too hard, seeing that they had plenty of nectar, as only I could. After all, no one cares for bees more than me.” She leaned forward. “No one does more for the bees than I do, and they should be grateful for that!”
“I’m grateful, er…I think,” said Cuckoo Bee from his dark corner. He looked at Bumblebee and shrugged.
Queen Bee was now pacing and ranting as her Royal Army swarmed this way and that, careful to stay out of her way. “I finally realized that I was a queen. The queen. And what does a queen do? She rules!”
And with that, Queen Bee spun a globe of the world that was at her fingertips. Her laughter filled the halls of the castle. She was obviously absorbed in the vision of her own greatness.
Bumblebee knew that now was her chance. She needed to spring into action before Queen Bee realized that Mr. and Ms. Andrena-Beecher’s guards were nowhere to be seen. She turned on her power. There was less than fourteen minutes of energy left. As Bumblebee felt the welcome surge of her super suit powering up, one of the Royal Army bees startled her.
“Knock, knock! Who’s there?” a familiar voice asked. “Bee. Bee who? Look who’s bee-hind you!”