Fascinating. The beeple do things differently; the queens seem to be the equivalent of blue, and the consorts are green, and the workers are everything else (although some workers are effectively green, since there aren't enough consorts to fill out the whole caste).

Amentans don't divide by sex like that but it seems like it makes sense with their biology!

The beeple find the idea of everyone being a queen or consort kind of distressing but understand that it probably works for Amentans. Except the population control thing, wow, that sounds unpleasant, beeple queens of course have lots and lots of children, they only need to control the number of new queens.

Beeple queens are so lucky! Amentans have various systems of population control; Tapa uses a credit auction, which is the most popular method, and abides by international treaties about controlling population growth.

Oh, yes, the beeple have those too. International treaties about population growth, that is, not credit auctions.

That's good to hear.

They only apply to queens, though, if one country has a sudden increase in workers for some reason--well, it's not like the swell will carry on to future generations. And queens are always the bottleneck on reproduction, so it doesn't matter how many consorts there are.

That makes sense if they have a means of sex selection.

It's random whether a given pregnancy will be a single reproductive baby or several workers but they need a special nutrient to have queen babies instead of consort babies.

Coooool. Amentans have randomly gendered babies, although they can do sex selection if they have some reason to want to, like a sex-linked genetic disorder.

If they can do sex selection why do they have the same number of queens as consorts?

Well, if they decided to have a lot more men than women, the men would mostly not get to have children and they would be very unhappy about that, and many of them also wouldn't get to have sex partners and they'd be unhappy about that too. This way most people can find sex partners and have at least one or two children.

Having several men married to each woman works for the beeple but they suppose it might be different for Amentans.

Some people do that but it's difficult to make it work.

Really? How so?

People find they have incompatible lifestyles or romantic jealousy and smaller households are easier. Three-person arrangements are not too uncommon though.

Romantic jealousy? What's that?

Many Amentans prefer that their partner not have any other partners.

Weird.

It can be inconvenient, yes.

Sounds it.

Workers aren't reproductive, but they do have erogenous zones and form romantic and sexual relationships.

And it doesn't bother them that they can't have children?

No, they don't have the reproductive drive that queens and consorts do. It would pretty much suck to be them if they did.

There are some Amentans who don't spring, that being the reproductive cycle they go through on an annual basis during their fertile years, but this is widely considered undesirable in one's children since then one won't get any grandchildren. There are a number of efforts to make Amentans happy with fewer children but they all have very small and slow effects. In the medium term what they really need is a way to get to other planets.

That makes sense.

The accident of choreography that allowed them to make contact with Amenta was novel and is going to have to be studied very diligently before they can be confident of reaching other planets, but even if they decide they can't trust Amentans with teleportation--or Amentans just can't do it, that also seems plausible--they could probably arrange some sort of ferry deal.