Hive Hoh!

Fairy house HOH-530 of Washington State's Olympic National Park, providing you with answers to your curious questions, and live updates on the Hoh Rainforest fairy colony.

[halfstack-smp]

The Endless Origin: Fairy

We who came from the lowest creatures of the earth- butterflies, beetles, moths, bees, every tireless and loathsome sort that the common man can elect to ignore- we did not name our peoples before our neighbors bestowed us with their own.

What word was there that could encompass us? So varied of our breadth of eyes, antennae, horns, mouths, mandibles, many splendored arms or lack thereof. Show me a single image that could have united us all, and I will speak its name. Those friendly titles, granted by the first outsider Unseelie, are as close as anyone could fathom.

Fairy. Fae. Sprite. Pixie. Sidhe. Seelie. Senseless drivel, all of it.

But there are worse things in this world than to be blessed.

-Mahin Loves-the-Moon, Seelie, Winterguard of Giant's Thorn

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[hivehoh]

hey gang.

it's me @aenor-llelo, lad who ran this blog.

i had really big ambitions for hive hoh! i wanted it to last! but i had to grind out enough money to leave an abusive home, move across the country, and find ways to work while my only computer was exploded. this was a long process that took several months, and it's still ongoing. i had less time, and what little time i had wasn't able to be used as well as i wanted because i lacked certain resources.

i don't regret putting out content people liked, but i do regret that it meant i could only focus on the things people were paying for. hive hoh... wasn't paying. and i needed to make rent.

but i wanted to preserve something of hive hoh. so in one of my current projects- @halfstack-smp- i kept the fairies, and i kept mahin. i'm later going to release a written short, "Mahin Loves The Moon", focused on some of the characters and that Hive Hoh would have gotten to if it had lasted longer. If you want to see more of what we did in hive hoh, i'd suggest following the halfstack blog instead.

@hivehoh is an archive now. there will be no more posts, and the askbox will be closed.

sorry, gang. i hope we had fun.

[hivehoh]

April fools! Haha, what's that? We only know April Fish.

[hivehoh]

What would the faeirys do if someone fell asleep in the Grove? Would they get curious or just stay away?

As soon as you've been asleep long enough, fairies will just start crawling all over you and steal your pocket change.

Just say goodbye to everything in your pockets they can fly away with, really.

Sleeping giants are free treasure.

[hivehoh]

Do the fairies have any winter habits or traditions?

They mostly stay inside when the weather takes a bad turn! They get more territorial in winter- intruders let the cold in and could potentially steal resources- so they don't really let humans fuck around and find out what they get up to during that time.

(Mahin is an outlier and should not be counted.)

But we can make some educated guesses based on what they do for indoors, or when it rains. They repair their nests, make new clothes for themselves and upcoming adults, and tend to any animals they keep with them.

[hivehoh]

Have you ever received fairy first-aid?

Once, after I fell in a ditch when I was nine. A group of wild fairies just kind of came up and chilled out until my siblings found me. That's what really got me into trying to understand fairies.

Didn't have any more fairy first-aid moments until I started working here! Now, I could get a paper cut and there'd be at least one little guy around trying to kiss it better.

It's pretty cute! Wish I could stick around longer.

[hivehoh]

Those babies remind me a lot of the furry caterpillars with venomous spines. It is safe to touch them when they’re showing their adult colors?

Very carefully, and don’t go rubbing your eyes afterwards. Though we wouldn’t recommend the average parkgoer to try and touch a sprite, since adults will be able to smell the traces of a baby on you and get agitated.

[hivehoh]

So you mentioned that fairies can only gain the wing colors/shapes of insects from the lepidoptera family, right? Did they ever have cousins(?) that gained the wings of other insects like dragonflies or bees, or have there only ever been butterfly and moth fairies?

Only insects from the butterfly family! Some depictions of fairies in art show other kinds of wings, but there’s not much evidence to back it up- these are either extinct variants or human invention.

[hivehoh]

Do the fae parents and the sprites share some kind of genetic memory? Or just instincts?

We aren't actually sure. But fairy sprites seem to share the food preferences their mothers did, and a fairy that died an unnatural death sometimes bears sprites that have a phobia of what killed their predecessor.

[hivehoh]

do fairies have capitalism

they're not dolphins, anon. they have standards.

[hivehoh]

Do fairies themselves adapt to different environments, or do they remain the same other than their butterfly types? So if you gave fairies from two different continents the same butterfly diet, would they be pretty much the same?

The only regional differences between fairies are through their spritehood diet! They can be transferred to other regions and adapt perfectly fine.

Two different fairies fed the same exact food will indeed look similar, though individuals will have different preferences to how much of each food they seek out, which means they won't quite look identical.

[hivehoh]

Its been months but i just wanted to check in on the faries. How are they doing? Are they having a good winter? Any births of sprites?

The sprites are starting to sprout! it's less than last year, but still a healthy amount.

Sorry for the lack of updates this last season! Winter is a pretty low-activity time of year for fairies when they hunker down- they spend a lot of their time inside the colony housing, and they prefer not to be disturbed in their homes.

[hivehoh]

What would happen if a fairy got it’s wings injured?

If it was just a little tear, it’ll heal up! But if the wing got torn off, it can be reattached with adhesives or replaced with a transplant, just like with regular butterflies!

I’ve even seen some fairies flying around with cut bird feathers as prosthetics.

[hivehoh]

Do any of the more intelligent fairies every prove to b a hassle? I imagine they could be some rather lighthearted troublemakers intended or not.

@ whoever lost a big pack of plastic sword toothpicks in the park, you’re never getting it back. The fairies have given themselves the right to bear arms.

[hivehoh]

Oh the fae babies are squishy ohh now I really want to squish the fae but I know they proboly won't like that

They are very squishy. The urge to gently squish the babies like gummy bears is powerful, but I continue to resist.

[hivehoh]

For the Caledonian Forest colony, do the fairies know what to feet the corgis? Are they fruit dogs?

Fairies scout for dead animals to harvest bones, skins, and feathers, so the Caledonian dogs get to have the meat since fairies don’t need those bits. :)

Fairies in other colonies will hang out with wolves or crows for meat cleanup.

[hivehoh]

So if fairy wing patterns are similar to dancing. Does that mean that some patterns are like meme dancing? Do fairies even have memes? Or jokes? Or pranks?

If someone taught the fairies to default dance I would finally retire probably. (For legal reasons this is a joke.)

[hivehoh]

Are there any games or stuff like that that faeries like to play?

They like flying in patterns! Sometimes they’ll just do it in front of each other, but other times they’ll do patterns in pairs or groups.