Human-sized insects with extremely deadly stings and beautiful black and yellow stripes. A fortunately peaceful species able to communicate with each other psychically (their range of senses is enormous, and thoughts are one of the many, many things they can detect). Without vocal chords, they communicate with other species by somehow creating recognisable voices from the noise of their buzzing, and rubbing their limbs together. They have sexual organs which are compatible with males and females of other species, and therefore consider themselves hermaphrodites. Only the Queen wasp can give birth, but all wasps can (and do) fertilise the Queens (of other nests to avoid diseases from incest). They cannot be angered easily, even by being attacked - they feel no pain or fear of death. If killed, their souls float back to their hives and reincarnate in the belly of their Queen Wasp, who lays them with their minds intact. As an example of this phonomena, it's known that a wasp got into an interesting conversation about morals with a human that was attacking it. The human killed the creature, and a week later was visited by a young version of it that casually continued the chat as if it had merely paused between breaths (fortunately the fight was called off). All wasps except the Queen have a life expectancy per body of about a year. Their health only ever seems to hover between perfect and dead.
Wasps are afraid of one type of death, however. If there is no Queen in the hive, there is no way for a wasp soul to return to life, and it will die like any other creature. (Incidentally, if the queen is dying, she can usually save herself by trapping her own mind and soul into an egg and laying it. The resulting wasp is not a queen, however). Wasps stop being so friendly, and become very insular, only emerging from their hives to kidnap a female of any other species that may become a suitable replacement Queen. That female is seduced by bewitching pheromones (and the very tempting offer of being the pampered charge of a very powerful army of creatures) and, if receptive, is mated by literally hundreds of wasps. During this event she transforms and starts to lay her first eggs, much to the relief of the wasps. From that point on the woman is doomed to lay eggs every few seconds for the rest of her life. In return she becomes the ruler of the hive and gains all the benefits this entails.
Wasps scavenge for fruit, giant flower pollen and creatures to feed the hive. When they hope to get away with it, these victims tend to be intelligent. But they never overtly steal people, trying to keep this craving for intelligent animals secret from others that may endanger them.
Queen wasps resemble their old species vaguely in shape, but they are always much larger and are covered in chitinous armour, with six legs and insectine head and abdomen. They usually have two vaginal / ovipositor organs, one tipping their abdomen, the other where their original form used to have one, which allows them to be fertilised while simultaneously laying eggs. Their life expectancy is triple that of their original breed. Instead of dying at the end of this span (which is always impossible to predict), they can choose to place their mind and soul into the last egg they will ever lay, and become a normal wasp. They are by necessity sexually ravenous creatures. They mate with unrelated wasps from other hives only, or other species (to express their friendship). Due to their size and busyness, they may actually carry around a wasp while it's mating with her, experiencing orgasm after orgasm while dealing with Hive affairs. Her young follow her everywhere, to protect her and take away the eggs she casually lays.
Humans recognise the need to treat Queen wasps as true royalty, though this can be difficult when talking to a giant insect that's being humped by a smaller bug while her huge distended abdomen lays eggs. Particularly when they have to keep moving to stop tentacles from growing up from under their feet…
A living entity by itself as well as the home to thousands of wasps. It's the size of a small hill, which it resembles from the outside. It's body is a honeycomb (literally) of rooms and corridors made from substance like dried wood-pulp. The substance is warm and pleasant to walk over. The hive has a massive stomach built into it's walls and floors. In this massive sac float hundreds of creatures, all described below. It seems to be sentient, but it's thoughts and memories are actually coming from those it has swallowed.
The hive feeds upon people lured to it by the wasps. Standing upon the hill, they are seduced by strangely alluring members of their species which are actually extruded hive victims.
Possibly the strangest creatures in this world. They float in digestive fluid, and are uniformly composed of the digested nutrients that were once their bodies before being swallowed by the hive. They are still quite alive, and at the beginning (just after being swallowed) their shapes resemble their original forms. However, as the consistency of their new bodies are a sort of soup, they frequently merge with each other and come out of it with body parts of the other creatures, meaning the vast majority of hive victims are hybrids of species and sex. They are usually very sexually promiscuous, and the process of merging and filling others with themselves more than satisfies these urges. Particularly prized sexual partners are recent victims that retain their original forms, or those with body parts particularly wanted by someone (eg. A human shaped victim would be pursued by more monstrous entities with a lust to steal her arms and legs and replace them with their own animal-like ones).
Basically, life in the hive's walls is a perpetual goopy orgy of merging and mating. No entity can harm or hurt any other entity inside this fleshy prison, and no entity can escape the Hive stomach, nor would they want to as their liquid bodies couldn't possibly survive (unless they somehow retained their powers of transformation).
The Hive uses the victims' minds to think with. It's quite common for a victim to feel their mind suddenly animate with dark, weird thought processes, which is just the Hive accessing their mind and drawing upon experience, memories, skills or deduction / calculation facilities. The victims form an extremely powerful and versatile database for the Hive, it's insect tenants, and more powerful Hive victims to examine.
A second purpose of victims is to sustain the insects of the Hive. The wasps slide their mouthparts into the hive walls and suckle at the fluids until a victim is drawn against it's proboscis and is drained of his/her/it's/hir body liquids until either the insect is sated or the victim is fully swallowed. The process of suckling is the most sexually pleasurable feeling a victim can get. If fully swallowed, the victims' memories are lost to the Hive, but their mind and soul will be transferred to an egg in the Queen's belly. This egg will develop into normal insect larvae, and the victim will live the rest of it's life/lives as a wasp.
A third purpose for a victim is to use as bait for seducing pepole on the hive hill to add to the collective. The Victim is permitted to extrude itself from the hill and attempt to seduce any newcomers. If the seduction is succesful, the Victim drinks the newcomer alive, sucking him dry and adding him to the Hive as a new Victim. In return, the bait gets 'first dibs' on the new creature's body.
A fourth purpose of a victim is to be used in experiments to create useful insect/Victim hybrids, slaves or allies of the wasps. Their pulpy bodies lend themselves well to be merged with insect structures, and their knowledge of how to use oddly shaped bodies means shapes other than insectlike can be created. For example, a massive insect-dragon has been observed, when a more normal dragon appeared and tried to dine upon too many wasps (the outcome of the ensuing fight/mating is unclear, but the insect-dragon has been seen since with a much larger body, and two heads…)
Hive Victims tend to have a fairly happy life, free from danger and full of extremely varied sex. They have a society, and 'currency' based upon barter of their body parts, sexual favours and access to interesting thoughts. Their social structure is based upon size of the Victims - larger victims can dominate smaller ones with their superior psychic abilities and ability to absorb others' bodies into their own. But then larger creatures tend to be easier to catch and suckle by the insects. Submission and domination are an important part of this structure.