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Honey, with its unique stickiness, flaxen color, and sweet taste, has long been an object of great desire among the Awatute, tempered by the equally great dangers to life and limb inherent in the harvesting process. As such, one of the enduring problems facing the Awatute ever since their formation, perhaps not one of the most significant ones it should be said, has been figuring out how to harvest it in a fashion that minimizes risk of injury. It was right around the year 0 when one Awatute individual finally found the genesis of a solution.

It all started, as such things often happen to start, with a happy coincidence: one fine summer day, Hromi, the youngest member of the Council of the Thinkers, known for her great curiosity, noticed a swarm of bees resting on a tree branch near their hive as a result of smoke from a controlled burn of the nearby undergrowth. The other Thinkers at first responded with good-natured laughter when she brought this up during a discussion about the difficulties of the honey-gathering process. With continued deliberation, however, they all began to realize that there was actually something to Hromi’s chance observation, and that it was worth deliberately replicating as long as conditions, particularly the wind, cooperated.

Soon enough, the right day came, and by the time it went, what the Thinkers saw had positively convinced them of the efficacy of properly directed smoke as a calming agent, which in turn allowed for the safe collection of honey. From there, this novel use of controlled burns rapidly spread through Awatute society. The subsequent year was a happy time for Awatute with a sweet tooth, until the next summer confronted the Thinkers with a whole new, not-so-sweet problem: an abject lack of bees and their hives in the area immediately surrounding Dekotarate. Again, the genesis of the solution was a happenstance discovery by Hromi.

She had absentmindedly left some partially broken jars by a lone tree in a meadow outside her family’s dwelling a few months ago, and on rediscovering them, found a colony of bees living in one! Something clicked in Hromi’s mind right then and there, and she resolved to dedicate herself to nurturing these bees and creating new hives, in time becoming known as the first beekeeper of the Awatute. Subsequently, she turned her individual discovery into a collective windfall of bee products by teaching numerous others how to keep bees, in line with the principles of Awatute society. Many years later, this windfall wound up reaching an extent that the limited memory of even groups of beekeepers proved inadequate to track…