CML - Ja'ka Wasps~

Log #0688

Since the ancient times, Ja'ka wasps honey was known for it's amazing restorative properties. During the great war every jar of it was worth it's weight in gold, naturally experiments with creating an artificial copy were being performed, but to no avail. As not even one laboratory was able to reproduce the restorative properties of the original essence, the researches took a different route with genetically improving the wasps to produce more. One island on the ocean hosted that research. After some time, the genetic engineers were able to make the wasps grow bigger and bigger after steadily stimulating the growth genes and hormones of the wasp queens which resulted in having them produce larger quantities of honey, while keeping in check that the medical properties aren't getting diluded as a side effect. The results were satisfying for a few months. The only problems was that the now called "giant ja'ka" pupa didn't survive till it's hatching day as the greatly enlarged eggs were too fragile to last in exposure to natural elements and foreign objects. The hive couldn't progress, and eventually started to die off from the lack of working drones. To prevent the fiasko of the project a new giant population was scheduled to be created from scratch to keep the honey production in line, but that was greatly slowing down the whole process and making it barelly profitable.

Logically, now the attention of the scientist was turned towards making sure that the next generations pupa will survive. In nature the ja'ka wasps hunted and used the bodies of stunned rodents for hybernating their queens eggs, in a warm and protective enviroment inside the hive. Since no rodent alive could host the giant wasps queen eggs, artificial egg hybernation containers were created one by one, each ending with no success. Then came tests with other, bigger live animals to take the place of the small rodents. The research took weeks with no response from the wasp queens. Till one day an accident happened when one of the staff women brought buckets of fruit into the giant terrarium for the queen wasps. Apparently using human growth hormones in the early process made the giant wasps breeding taste somehow attuned to the human bodily nature. The ja'ka wasps are in no means a predator and even with the rodents, after the pupa eggs hatched, the animal was thrown out of the hive to maybe "serve" the queen in the future again. Same was in this case but with the staff woman in place of the rodent. It was a breakthrough and the first "naturally born" generation of pupa was crawling around the hive. A campaing looking for "female volunteers" and "we can help our country" posters were launched, unfortunatly public opinion was not so patriotic as one may think during a war and once the word got out, the whole experiment was marked as inhumane, unnatural and immoral. Yet, the honey manufacturing kept going till the end of the war. 

A few months afer the peace treaty was signed the hive facility was officialy shut down due to "unacceptable moral values and playing with higher powers" and the island left abandoned. People thought that the giant ja'ka wasp will die out naturally in time, if they would not find proper egg hosts. Of course that never did happen. Up to this day, ja'ka honey is an extremly precious natural resource used in tons of medications. If you dig deep enought into it you'll find that there even do exist unofficial teams of women sponsored by farmaceutical giants who frequently gather it from the hive island for a high price. Individual people can gather it for themselves too, you just need to bribe the island outpost guards and have a bit broken moral compas... probably thanks to our friend Geno...

Early sketch version [19/05/2018] https://www.patreon.com/posts/cml-jaka-wasps-18899607

Done with black pen on ink and OC on greyscale.

Constance "Coyotka" Jotkowska, Ksi Rakasa and art © me ;3