Chapter 21 - The Queen Bee in Nature (Patreon)

This was, admittedly, a bit of an oversimplification, but they were essentially bugs that lived in hives, most akin to a Terran bee, each Hur'q caring little for itself or its own life and lacking much in the way of a personal identity. They served the hive, but not necessarily the Queen. While there was only a single queen per hive, and they were certainly important with a vital function that only she could perform, she could be replaced easily enough if she wasn’t productive enough, became too old, became diseased, was too injured, or was failing in some way in her leadership of the hive.

In nature, this was called ‘supersedure.’ A new queen replacement would be grown and the old queen would be killed to allow the replacement to take over. It was unclear, though, how sentience affected this process when it came to the Collectors. So, a Collector Queen wasn't 'served' so much as she was cared for, but only while she was adequately doing her job. Plus, to allow her to do her job, she got the highest level of protection and the best food available to the hive, as I'd unfortunately seen firsthand. That woman’s screams of abject terror as she was eaten alive whole haunted me to this day, and I had previously thought nothing could phase me anymore after spending years on Bajor. It was possibly, maybe even likely though, that the Collectors in the mobile hive we’d boarded would grow a replacement queen, then kill the old one, after the damage the hive had suffered at the hands of the Tikuma.