The initiative to create a strain more adapted to the water found success in an unusual pairing with the beetle breeding program. Our efforts to create a hybrid between the beetles and our own species have finally borne fruit, and we now have a small number of these hybrids. As our species has evolved it has gradually become larger and larger, but these hybrids surprisingly resist that trend in that they are smaller and lighter than both the beetles and many of our current phenotypes. Initial experiments have shown that they are capable of floating in water where most of our heavier insects eventually sink, and they can swim (albeit somewhat awkwardly, and not easily through moving water as in the river).

As a sign of goodwill, we planted a number of flowers and other plants near the beetle nest. The local beehive there has begun to pollinate those plants and seems quite appreciative. We attempted to similarly reach out to the third and most distant colony of bees, but when our worker drones arrived bearing seeds, they were witnesses to a brutal skirmish between a giant wasp and a dozen bees. Though the wasp was a giant when compared to the bees and it easily bit one or two of them in half, it was soon overwhelmed. The bees almost suicidally threw themselves onto it in a great heap, covering it so completely that it fell from the air before suffocating and overheating. That particular beehive seems highly distressed and they have been in a frenzy ever since that hostile encounter with the wasp.