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I don't know if this is the right board for this but here it goes.
What would a giant bee usually eat exactly? As it stands bees are very specialized to consume nectar from plants much larger then themselves but if they managed to get to the size of a horse their ability to harvest enough nectar to sustain themselves or a hive kind of goes out the window. So what do they eat when living in an area a lot like their normal environments and lacking giant flowering plants?
Other bee hives? Large flora and fauna?
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Other bee hives? Large flora and fauna?
I could see other bee hives maybe but they would need an insane amount of hives to collect the amount of food they need.
As for the latter wouldn't that mean they would need to be very different from bees just to consume them? Or more disturbingly would that mean they make a honey of some kind composed of animal byproduct, a "Red Honey" per say?
They could also become flesh eating bee's
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For help with this query, we turn to...DR. BEES!
Ahem. That said, I suggest they work in symbiosis with giant Plant-type monster (e.g. an apple treant that has giant bees help it pollinate every spring).
I do like the idea of them working with some of the larger plant species but as it stands we unfortunately don't really have a lot of giant flowering plants in the current creature roster. Combine that with their lower CR and it makes the Giant Bee a creature that feels like something you're supposed to see at lower levels which is usually indicative of environments that are a little less fantastical (and a little less dangerous to low level players) and usually less giant pollinators.
That being said I could also see them having more ways of creating honey and therefore being able to produce more diverse food stuffs like gathering plant matter to then be processed into a green plant glucose rich green honey or protein rich red honey.
I would say they just eat carrion and/or virtually any sort of vegetable matter. Their giant digestive systems are adapted to break down nearly any organic matter into the sugars and proteins they need to survive and make honey. I dont' see any need to get much more scientific than that.
It doesn't need to be a creature-type plant. There could just exist an ecosystem with gigantic flowering plant species. Best part is, you don't need to stat them. They're just flowers.
Really huge flowers.
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Since you want to avoid fantastical explanations, let's consider some bee trivia. A typical honeybee regularly ranges across twelve square miles and weighs in at ~100 mg. In a typical journey it will visit 1500 flowers scattered over a 12 sq. mile range and it will repeat this without sleep for its entire 7-week lifespan, along with its 70-100,000 hivemates.
Paizo has kindly provided us the weight and dimensions of a giant bee. There's an incongruity there... if we presume that the giant bee has the same proportions as a honey bee then the weight is on the low side, but my sense of verisimilitude likes a sleaker and more aerodynamic insect. At 60 lbs, if the giant bee's metabolic efficiency is similar to the honeybee (this is probably untrue, given their longer 10 year lifespan), a single insect is the equivalent of 3 normal hives. Possibly foreseeing exactly your question, Paizo has also kindly told us that the largest organizational structure of Giant Bees is a Nest that tops out at 19. This would make the most robust Giant Bee colony in Golarion the equivalent of 60 hives. Now, hives of normal bees can coexist in overlapping territory, but let's presume that isn't the case for the giants. 60 hives have a combined foraging territory of 720 square miles (a 15 mile radius). That's not so hard to believe really.
Then of course we can add a bit of symbiotic ecology to the mix. If giant bees are super pollinators, farmers might well choose to rotate dense clover fields into their crop rotation to attract their attention. Such a bounty would reduce the necessary foraging range of the bees and every little community could sustain a colony of its own. Farmers might go so far as to venerate the bees and hunt the larger raptors and spiders that prey upon them. Or perhaps they sustainably hunt the bees themselves, for meat, fuzz or stingers to make into farm tools and sharp pointy weapons. This latter notion also plays into the visual you probably have of giant bee swarms that cover entire fields....
Dude, +1
I'm happy to see that I wasn't the only one thinking bumblebee more then normal honey bee as a template for what a large bee colony structure would look like. Also love the farming idea and how there doesn't have to be much change to keep them well fed.
Now I have some awesome ideas on building some farm cultures around these large underground honey hives of bees and using them as both pollinators and resources. Now I really want my part to find a hibernating hive of them during their winter trek and try to raid them for supplies.
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If you're going to go down that road, consider working a Vermin Druid into your campaign (I can't seem to find the archetype any longer for some reason, but it's out there). In a community that cares about their bees, a Bee Whisperer would be invaluable. One might even reside in a major hive to ensure its safety through the dormant season. Little would shock PC's more in their quest to raid a hive than a highly intelligent bee companion or worse, a spell-casting bee. It's somewhat debatable whether a Giant Bee could be Awakened, since the spell is clearly intended for animals and plants but does not explicitly call for the Animal type. If you were to allow it, an Awakened Queen could be a very interesting NPC.
Good lord, a bee queen druid. That is horrifying
And now I must have it.
Also there isn't an archetype to get vermin companions, they are just an option now that got intro'd in Ultimate Magic. Unfortunately they haven't added to it since then which makes me sad, cause I want a giant bee or mammoth flea companion.
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You could make werebee's....if you wanted to get crazy.
I love your research, Peasant. Awesome.
You could make werebee's....if you wanted to get crazy.
In my own home-brew games, I use the term "Therianthrope" instead of "Lycanthrope" ("therian" meaning "animal" while "lycan" meaning "wolf"), which actually opens things up quite a bit.
(I also make "vermin" a "sub-type" of "animal" and "magical beast".)
While the implication (as the linked wikipedia notes) is mammalian, I've used the broad term to include other creature types as well.
In one of my 3.5 games set in FR, I had an entire subplot of were-spiders, using the giant spider as a therianthrope template - the gang required their members to "take the bite" and if they survived the poison as well as the transformation, they gained power and were allowed to live. (One of the players actually got it while fighting them - natural 1 on his really, really impressive fortitude save -, and eventually used it to become a demigod of "surface spiders", much to Lolth's unrelenting fury).
Of course sometimes, when we bother to play a game with that level of detail, I also try to treat Therianthrope as a "cursed with awesome" - the animal side has the animal's lifespan. However only the "side" that's out at any one time is the "side" that ages. Thus, if carefully used, it could extend someone's lifespan... or dramatically shorten it. Imagine a young woman transforming into an elderly horse, for example, or an old man transforming into a young hawk.
Oh, I also tend to "expand" the size categories of infected by one step, and include monstrous humanoids under the "humanoid" entry of what can and cannot be "infected" with therianthrope. Really interesting combinations arise out of all this.
So... this is basically my way of "dotting" this thread.
Anyway, happy gaming!
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If you're going to go down that road, consider working a Vermin Druid into your campaign (I can't seem to find the archetype any longer for some reason, but it's out there). In a community that cares about their bees, a Bee Whisperer would be invaluable. One might even reside in a major hive to ensure its safety through the dormant season. Little would shock PC's more in their quest to raid a hive than a highly intelligent bee companion or worse, a spell-casting bee. It's somewhat debatable whether a Giant Bee could be Awakened, since the spell is clearly intended for animals and plants but does not explicitly call for the Animal type. If you were to allow it, an Awakened Queen could be a very interesting NPC.
Given that bees, normal ones anyway, communicate by 'dancing,' a Bee Dancer would be more appropriate. Perform: Bee Dance, or maybe Language: Bee Dance.
I presume you mean bee keepers that specialize in giant bes, but a bee keeper that's a giant could also be fun. Some would consider a Cloud Giant Apiculturist a major menace as he moves across the landscape on his fluffy flying fortress, allowing his hives to devastate the local ecology wherever he goes.
I Am So Doing This!
My own two cents would be for your giant bees to use fruits instead of nectar. It wouldn't take much in the way of intelligence for them to destroy non-fruit trees in their range so as to create vast orchards of, say, apple trees, or even something like sugarcane in warmer climes.
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Since you want to avoid fantastical explanations, let's consider some bee trivia. A typical honeybee regularly ranges across twelve square miles and weighs in at ~100 mg. In a typical journey it will visit 1500 flowers scattered over a 12 sq. mile range and it will repeat this without sleep for its entire 7-week lifespan, along with its 70-100,000 hivemates.
Paizo has kindly provided us the weight and dimensions of a giant bee. There's an incongruity there... if we presume that the giant bee has the same proportions as a honey bee then the weight is on the low side, but my sense of verisimilitude likes a sleaker and more aerodynamic insect. At 60 lbs, if the giant bee's metabolic efficiency is similar to the honeybee (this is probably untrue, given their longer 10 year lifespan), a single insect is the equivalent of 3 normal hives. Possibly foreseeing exactly your question, Paizo has also kindly told us that the largest organizational structure of Giant Bees is a Nest that tops out at 19. This would make the most robust Giant Bee colony in Golarion the equivalent of 60 hives. Now, hives of normal bees can coexist in overlapping territory, but let's presume that isn't the case for the giants. 60 hives have a combined foraging territory of 720 square miles (a 15 mile radius). That's not so hard to believe really.
Then of course we can add a bit of symbiotic ecology to the mix. If giant bees are super pollinators, farmers might well choose to rotate dense clover fields into their crop rotation to attract their attention. Such a bounty would reduce the necessary foraging range of the bees and every little community could sustain a colony of its own. Farmers might go so far as to venerate the bees and hunt the larger raptors and spiders that prey upon them. Or perhaps they sustainably hunt the bees themselves, for meat, fuzz or stingers to make into farm tools and sharp pointy weapons. This latter notion also plays into the visual you probably have of giant bee swarms that cover entire fields....
Is it wrong that the thing I took away from this was 'Apply a DC XX Fort check to PCs who spend an hour in the area due to intense hayfever.'
I take a page from Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away: the metabolism of giant critters is partly material, partly magic. When the magic levels get low enough, those creatures end up stunted, smaller. Regular bees might just be giant bees that aren't exposed to enough mana.
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I presume you mean bee keepers that specialize in giant bees, but a bee keeper that's a giant could also be fun. Some would consider a Cloud Giant Apiculturist a major menace as he moves across the landscape on his fluffy flying fortress, allowing his hives to devastate the local ecology wherever he goes.
Also, if I remember correctly, the Corpse Flower is an oddity in that it has evolved to attract flies as pollinators. It takes its name from an aroma not unlike that of rotting meat (attractive to carrion eaters). That brings to mind a few questions about the ecology of giant vermin in general...
How much blood does it take to sustain a swarm of Giant Mosquitoes?
What great beast produces enough manure to make a colony of Giant Dung Beetles feasible? Are there entire forests girdled and killed by the movement of growing megainsectae under the bark? And since crabs are also vermin... do crabbing vessels occasionally disappear when a ship-killer crab gives the pot-lines a good tug and sinks the whole craft? So many strange and interesting stories can emerge from fantasy ecology. It's neat.
In my mind a lot of larger insects that predate on other creatures exclusively don't normally swarm and if so in very small numbers. Like Giant mosquitos would only attack in small groups and then in groups of no more then maybe 10 and only in places that have a lot of viable prey.
As for crabs, yes I totally see crabbing as a far more dangerous profession in a pf world where many crabbers know that sometimes they could end up with something on the line that starts pulling them in. One of the other things I like to work under is that swarms of crabs are most likely swarms of giant crab nymphs that are grouped together for protection and are most likely herded and hunted like bait balls by various aquatic predators.