Chapter 64 - Chapter 64: Chapter 59: The Steward’s Dispute i (1/2)

Chapter 64: Chapter 59: The Steward’s Dispute i

Translator: 549690339

Almost all animals and even plants possess this genetic ability.

It is also an essential skill for them to ensure the normal continuation of their offspring.

“Can you make a worker bee fly within the range of the banyan tree?”

Qin Niu wanted to test with a honeybee.

But in the whole swarm, only the Queen Bee obeyed his orders; he couldn’t command the other bees.

He even suspected they might have considered Qin Mu a member of their swarm.

“I can’t!”

The Queen Bee answered very definitively.

Just like the Ant Queen, the Queen Bee was only a breeding machine for rhe hive. She could control the order of the hive through queen bee pheromones and make sure everyone had their role to avoid chaos, but she couldn’t order them to venture to a specific place.

It could be understood that both bee and ant colonies acted as one, with the Queen Bee and Ant Queen being just members of the whole.

Completely different from the life and death authority of a human empire’s monarch.

In human society, if a monarch commands a subject to die, the subject has no choice but to die.

In the world of bees, it’s all about fulfilling roles, and if the worker bees feel the Queen Bee is too old, they might even dispose of her.

Qin Niu had to abandon the idea of sending honeybees in to scout.

It seemed he would have to rely on the termites after all.

At that time, he would have the whole termite colony mobilize, which was a major move that definitely required careful planning to minimize, or even eliminate, termite losses.

For this task, he thought it best to wait until the day after tomorrow, when rhe special termites bred from the Banyan Tree Blood would be more numerous, to better secure success.

Several termites have successfully made their way in and out.

But the real leader was only Fourth.

When he himself would go in, he definitely needed to take Fourth along.

Because Fourth had the most experience.

After observing for a while, and once the Treasured Sword finished absorbing all the Banyan Tree Blood, he began to collect humus.

It was everywhere in the hills; just mixing the right combination would yield a basket of top-quality fertilizer.

The price was as high as fifty wen per basket.

Close to noon, he carried a basket of soil down rhe mountain.

The Yan Family had at least two tea gardens.

He was too focused on collecting money earlier to ask which tea garden to deliver to.

Fortunately, the two tea gardens were very close to each other, at the foot of a tea mountain in the neighboring village.

The neighboring village was also known as Tea Flower Village.

The hills near the village had acidic loess suitable for tea tree growth, which the Yan Family had cultivated entirely for tea planting.

Every spring, around late October, the hills would be covered in blooming white tea flowers.

This village was thus named for this reason.

The tea trees planted on the mountain belonged to rhe tea oil tree variety, specifically for bearing seeds to press for tea oil.

Generally, the fruit would not be mature until the following autumn.

Each year, the Yan Family would press tea oil and take a large part to sell in the city, fetching about twelve to fifteen wen per jin.

It was one of the Yan Family’s economic sidelines, bringing in quite a profit each year.

Perhaps thinking the yield of tea oil was low and the profit not substantial, the Yan Family in recent years began to develop tea leaves.

They had cleared several slopes below the tea mountain and planted tea trees suitable for leaf-harvesting.

They might still be in the experimental phase, currently operating on a small scale.

Of course, that’s relative to the size of the Yan Family’s holdings.

A single tea garden covered at least seven or eight acres, which was not a small scale by any measure.

Qin Niu first arrived at the largest tea garden.

Looking around, there were tea trees all half the height of a person.

Lush and green, they seemed to be thriving, clearly a lot of care had been taken in their management.

While he was looking around, he saw a tea farmer in his forties loosening soil and weeding around the tea trees.