April Doyle’s Frightening (Near) Future

Hive is set in Britain in the not too distant future.  Climate change has decimated pollinator populations.  Crops intended for consumption by both man and beast are virtually nonexistent because bees, those trusty, reliable, tireless all-time alphas of hyper-pollination, are in huge trouble – their numbers reduced to almost nothing.  And as bees are pushed ever closer toward extinction, much of the British population is on the brink of starvation.  The British government has resorted to food rationing in an effort to save its people.  Civil unrest is the order of the day, and substantial segments of the population have turned to crime – often violent crime – to avert starvation.  And it’s not just happening in Britain.  International trade conferences fail, treaties are violated, and global economic collapse is imminent.  The world is in a very dangerous place. 

And it all boils down to the bees.

It’s a good thing that two of Hive’s protagonists are, respectively, a brilliant research entomologist and an indefatigable commercial bee farmer.  Dr. Annie Abrams, in charge of an ambitious bee conservation effort set in an immense simulated environment at Hattenden Agricultural College, has nurtured and protected her painstakingly cultivated multitude of bee colonies with the ultimate goal of releasing them into the British countryside in order to rejuvenate the land’s fast disappearing food crops.  Victor Martin, the rugged but kind bee farmer and family man, also nurtures and protects his own bees, but employs them annually in the real-world endeavors of actual farm crop pollination.  Annie’s bees can theoretically pollinate crops; Victor’s routinely do.

But the spectre of the planet’s climate crisis duly rears its ugly head and manifests itself in a further acute decline in working bee populations.  Victor, and others like him, have lost massive numbers of their bees to disease and various other environmental maladies.  There simply are not enough of these industrious little creatures left on the commercial bee farm circuit to do the work of pollinating the crops in Victor’s part of the world.  The governmental powers-that-be decide that a collaboration between Annie and Victor, and their bee populations – hers, healthy but untested, and his, ragged and torn but field-proven – is in order.

Although the resulting combination of forces does score some early successes, a series of tragic mishaps in the face of an ever diminishing food supply results in the need for supplemental measures.  In spite of Annie and Victor’s tireless efforts (sometimes conducted in the face of life threatening situations), the bee population is simply insufficient to effect the level of pollination required to ensure even minimal crop production.  Humanity in Britain, and throughout the world, faces a terrifying predicament.

At this point, an unexpected and dubious option presents itself to Annie and Victor: nanotechnology.  Artificially intelligent, tiny, flying robots – drones – may provide the solution.  Theoretically, these smart drones, in adequate numbers, could provide the necessary firepower to accomplish the wide scale pollination capabilities required to rejuvenate Britains waning food supplies.  Theoretically.  Unanswered questions hover in the air like… well, like bees.  Or drones.  Did the individual, or individuals, behind the cryptic black market internet advertisement really have not only the intellect, but also the production capabilities to create a massive fleet of smart, mechanical pollinators?  Could technology and nature successfully work together, in complementary fashion, to end the food crisis?  Could a sufficient number of these robotic pollinators be designed and built before time, and the food supply, ran out?  And who exactly was, or were, the brains behind this potential solution?

Suffice it to say that April Doyle answers these questions while treating readers to some real surprises, including the identity of the genius behind the drone nanotechnology, and the strange and horrifying truth behind a malevolent enterprise operating in secrecy while stopping at nothing to derail Annie and company’s efforts.