The second is the food supply for the bee colony; the Jade Spirit Bee mostly feeds on pollen, nectar, and the Spirit Honey they produce, with pollen from various Spiritual Medicines and Spirit Wood flowers being preferred.
However, the quantities of Spiritual Medicines and Spirit Wood are limited, and moreover, many varieties do not bloom annually.
This has led to the bee colony consciously controlling their own numbers to prevent starvation, not daring to breed too many offspring.
The second factor is easier to manage, now that the Zhou Family’s influence is rising. If they were to propose cooperation to the cultivation families in Lanzhou or even the neighboring states under the same terms as they once offered to the Wang Family of Hongyao Valley, it is unlikely that there would be many refusals.
In this way, by using other families’ medicine fields and orchards for beekeeping, it could expand the bee colony’s size by several times, or even tenfold!
As for the first factor, that is the main direction Zhou Chun needs to focus on.
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He must apply the insect-breeding techniques passed down by the Thousand Spirit Sect, weeding out the weak and keeping the strong, actively promoting the optimization of the Jade Spirit Bee’s bloodline, so that the rate of Demon Bees among their offspring increases significantly.
In this regard, he must make use of some specially prepared medicines and secret techniques.
It must be said that the Thousand Spirit Sect, as experts in insect play, has truly achieved a profound degree in the research and development of various insect-controlling and breeding secret techniques.
In the art of insect breeding, they possess special secret techniques that can stimulate the appetite and breeding time of Demon Insects, and even extend the hibernation period of the Demon Insects.
All these secret techniques can greatly assist in the growth of Demon Insects.
For example, a common combination is to stimulate the Demon Insects’ appetite with a secret technique, allowing them to consume a large amount of food at once, and then use another secret technique to extend their hibernation period, allowing them to digest the nutrition contained in their food during hibernation and reach maturity more quickly.
These secret techniques might have some adverse effects on the lifespan of Demon Insects, but they can indeed save a tremendous amount of time when conducting certain research.
At this moment, Zhou Chun’s research involved taking thirty larvae from the beehive and raising them separately.
Under his individual care, the larvae that normally took about three months to mature reached maturity in just one month.
Whether the offspring of the Jade Spirit Bee can become Demon Bees or not is revealed at the moment they mature.
Apart from a few exceptions, the vast majority of Demon Bees evolve to maturity after transitioning from larvae to adult form.
Under normal circumstances, Jade Spirit Bees that evolve into Demon Bees upon maturation are accepted as members of the colony.
Those bees that do not become Demon Bees are either driven away or killed.
It’s uncertain whether Zhou Chun is just lucky or that he invested heavily in the cultivation of these larvae.
The original ten-percent success rate for evolution almost doubled this time, with five of the thirty larvae being raised into Jade Spirit Bees.
These five Jade Spirit Bees are indistinguishable from the regular Spirit Bees, but they are all worker bees.
Although worker bees can lay eggs, the eggs laid by such worker bees are unlikely to grow and evolve into Demon Bees.
What Zhou Chun needs to do next is to produce a Bee King from these five Jade Spirit Bees.
According to the records of the Thousand Spirit Sect, the most effective way to optimize the bee colony’s bloodline is to enhance the Bee King’s own bloodline.
Because the other Spirit Bees in the colony are born from the Bee King, as long as the Bee King’s bloodline is optimized, the descendants it produces will naturally be even stronger.
But currently, there is only one Bee King in the Zhou Family’s beehive; Zhou Chun couldn’t possibly use that Bee King for experiments, as a failure resulting in its death would be a tremendous loss.
Therefore, he had to first establish a new, smaller bee colony and raise a new Bee King before he could experiment on it.
Before obtaining the heritage of the Thousand Spirit Sect, it was very difficult for the Zhou Family to raise a new Bee King.
But for Zhou Chun, who now has the inheritance from the Thousand Spirit Sect, raising a new Bee King is not too challenging.
In the natural state of a bee colony, when the Bee King dies unexpectedly, one of the other worker bees will take its place as the new Bee King.
Simultaneously, during a colony’s division, a new Bee King emerges in the same way.
The Jade Spirit Bee, being a type of Demon Bee, has a more difficult process for birthing Bee Kings than ordinary bees, but the general process remains similar. Experience more tales on freewebnovel
Zhou Chun then fed a strong worker bee a secret medicine refined mainly from royal jelly and supplemented the process with a secret technique to stimulate its growth.
It took merely two months to cultivate a new Bee King.
However, this new Bee King could not yet be used for experiments, as it was, after all, hastened into existence through artificial means, and its innate quality was considered rather poor.
Its true significance to Zhou Chun lay in its ability to contribute to the new bee colony’s expansion, thus increasing the number of bees.
Once it had expanded the bee colony to a certain extent, Zhou Chun would kill it and allow the colony to naturally produce a new Bee King.
Only then would the new Bee King be suitable for experimentation.
While conducting these bee cultivation experiments, Zhou Chun also began negotiating cooperative ventures with other families.
Given the Zhou Family’s current thriving reputation and their possession of a variety of special Spiritual Objects, most families readily agreed to the proposed collaborations, as anticipated.
In just one short year, the Zhou Family signed cooperation agreements with twenty-five large and small Cultivation families. In the future, the Zhou Family’s "Jade Spirit Beetles" could harvest nectar and produce honey within these allied families’ territories, and then settle payment in Spirit Honey or Spirit Coins.
As part of the cooperation, in turn, the Zhou Family would prioritise supplying these allied families with Demon Beast Cubs such as the Octagonal Aquatic Deer and the Dragon Scale Horse.
Of course, the Demon Beast Cubs supplied would all be males, and they would be neutered.
The real breeding stock, the Zhou Family would never sell to just anyone.
The price to purchase breeding stock would not equate to the cost of ordinary mounts.
Now, aside from the Zhou Family, only the Su Family, which had recently been a great help to the Zhou Family, possessed the breeding stock of Octagonal Aquatic Deer and Dragon Scale Horse, given by Zhou Chun as part of his proposal gifts.
Time slowly passed, and in the blink of an eye, another three years went by.
In this not-so-long span of three years, several changes had occurred within the Zhou Family.
Several elderly, "Jia" generation cultivators passed away, and one Zhou Family Cultivator failed during the Foundation Establishment after consuming a Foundation Establishment Pill.
The Cultivator who failed at Foundation Establishment was Zhou Zhengtao, who belonged to the same generation as Zhou Chun and was once regarded as a standout among the "Zheng" generation of Zhou Family members. Thanks to the family’s rapid development over the years, he had also accumulated a considerable amount of clan merit.
This time, after scraping together 5,000 points of merit, he exchanged them for a Foundation Establishment Pill to consume.
Unfortunately, his luck was evidently not as good as Zhou Zhengyong’s, and he ultimately failed at Foundation Establishment.
As the second person to fail at Foundation Establishment after settling in Jiufeng Ridge, Zhou Zhengtao’s failure had far less of an impact than Zhou Jiacheng’s previous one, principally because the Zhou Family was in a much more robust position now, with a steady stream of Purple Mansion Phase Cultivators and Foundation Establishment Stage Cultivators in their ranks.
Aside from Zhou Zhengtao’s own discouragement, only those Cultivators who had lent him clan merit were affected.
After all, those who could lend him clan merit had, by all accounts, a reasonably good relationship with him.
As Clan Leader, Zhou Chun had a rather open perspective on this matter since he himself had failed once before.
Therefore, he did not hold any grudge against Zhou Zhengtao; instead, he comforted Zhou Zhengtao very generously and tolerantly, just as Zhou Daoyi had comforted Zhou Jiacheng before.
This approach prompted Zhou Zhengtao, who had previously viewed him with jealousy and defiance, to feel both ashamed and convinced, leading him to genuinely respect Zhou Chun from then on.
However, the most significant change for the Zhou Family in these three years concerned Zhou Chun himself.
Firstly, his Spirit Pet, the Golden Armor Rock Turtle, successfully advanced to the second-tier mid-grade, further enhancing his personal strength.
Latterly, the "Jade Spirit Bee" breeding optimization experiment he spearheaded had reached a crucial moment.
By now, his newly cultivated bee colony had grown to thirty, and the Second Generation Bee Queen he had raised was nearly as strong as the Bee King of the current large-scale bee colony.
Next, he could officially begin the bloodline optimization experiment on this Second Generation Bee Queen.