Earth was in danger.
Jealous eyes gazed toward our Sun from a planet called Jive Hive in another star system, black compound eyes that peered without compassion as though we were flies caught on sticky paper ready for the fire.

The first of their suns was setting as blood orange light spilled into the valley. Three female worker bees, two over seven feet tall and the other not quite five feet, sat under a purple-flowered tree, sorting through various flowers.

"We can't go on like this much longer," Banter said. "There are too many of us. The hive has to find a new home. The Black Watch wasps, vicious as they are, know what they're doing. They've been scanning the skies for hundreds of years. And keeping a check on our population."

She sat next to her cousins, Zibb and Bipp. They had worked all day collecting pollen for their hive. Now they rested and talked of the Imperative—to colonize. The whole Jive Hive planet was abuzz with the news.

"Yes,” Zibb agreed. "The queen said this one is a plum ripe for the picking and only eight light years away. It'll be a brand new adventure for us. A new Jive Hive. We'll be tired when we arrive. From the long sleep."

"Too bad there are beings there." Banter selected a fresh flower and began culling its nectar.

"Too bad we have to kill them all," Zibb said. "I've heard the new planet's green and warm. I've heard from the wasp scouts that it's abused by its inhabitants, though."
"Their fault then and all the more reason to kill them. We must take it while we can."

Zibb began grooming her cousin. "The migration will be an adventure to be endured before it's ended. They say the trip will take eight years in suspended animation. Then, on arrival, our poor, wasted bodies must prepare for war." She sighed.

"Or negotiation," Banter offered. She picked up another flower.

"Never! Negotiation with General Vard and his black wasps?” Zibb shook her barbs in the air. “The Black Watch wouldn't allow it. No, the Eternity Drive will deliver some of us to an early death once we've arrived on Earth. The humans are said to be a warlike race. I don't think they'll offer to share their planet. And our Black Watch sure won't share it. Earth will be taken by force and the human survivors used for food for the wasps."

 

When Zibb, the giant alien Bee, kidnaps the boy Jason and holds him hostage in the great ship Skyhive, she does so because she thinks he's "cute." Is there such a thing as love at first sight, and can love exist between two such different creatures as a Bee and a human boy?

Love isn't always fuzzy and warm, like Zibb. It can crackle and flash between two different personalities. Sometimes that happens between Aadab Ali and his girlfriend Iodine, who have different faiths in a country hostile to differences of religion.

When I wrote the Jive Hive it wasn't about love at all. It was about a teenage boy and his quest to save the world in the only way he knew how, through music. Love permeates the book in spite of my intentions. There is love between Jason and his parents, between Aadab and Iodine, between Jason's parents and his little brother, even between Jason and the young man Aadab Ali. At the end there's love in a sitting room in Burma.

Love doesn't have to be sexual to be real. Even the Wasp General surprises us at last. He surprised me. And I wrote the book.