Yanme'e

"Drone" redirects here. For the unmanned aerial vehicles, see UNSC drones.

The Yanme'e, nicknamed Drones or Buggers by the UNSC, are a sapient insectoid species and one of the former client species of the Covenant. The species exhibits social structures comparable to terrestrial eusocial insects, with a strict division of labor among a set of biologically-distinct castes, whose roles have further diversified with technological and civilizational development.

Evolution and prehistory
The Yanme'e evolved on Palamok, a large but low-density terrestrial planet whose low gravity allowed local flora and fauna to grow to comparatively large sizes. The species' ancestors inhabited kilometers-tall forests and vast cavern systems prevented from collapsing under their own weight by the low gravity. Some xenobiologists believe that the Yanme'e (as well as most life on Palamok) may be distantly related to early forms of insectoid life found on Sanghelios, suggesting a possible case of ancestral biodisplacement hundreds of millions of years ago. However, this connection is too tenuous to say for certain.

Anatomy and physiology
Contrary to some popular preconceptions, the Yanme'e do not possess a literal collective consciousness; rather, all Yanme'e are distinct individuals, though their mode of cognition and emotional range do not readily map out to those of most Congruent species. The Yanme'e hive-mind mentality that informs the species' behavior is peculiar. There is a persistent difficulty in determining how much of the species' psychology is innate and biological, as opposed to being the product of culture or social and genetic engineering over numerous generations by the dominant hive-queens and/or the Covenant.

Most notably, they (including the queen) possess a natural inclination to work together for the good of the hive. This is not a mere cultural preference for conformity and consensus, but a trait hard-wired into the Yanme'e psychology. Because of this ingrained hive mentality, some interpretations regard Yanme'e hives as the basic unit of Yanme'e society, a kind of "meta-organism" that holds considerably more importance in viewing the species overall than Yanme'e individuals, with even the queen merely as an extension of the hive. In theory, a queen acts out of self-interest only as far as this concerns her vital role in the survival of the hive, but in practice, the cognitive flexibility that comes with sapience means Yanme'e are not beyond being driven by factors outside those bred into them by evolution. In addition, while most Yanme'e may be predisposed to serving the good of the hive as a collective, modern Yanme'e societies are so complex that individuals can have different opinions over how that greater good should be accomplished.

In the ongoing debate over how much of Yanme'e psychology is inbuilt and how much the result of culture and social engineering, it has been theorized that primordial Yanme'e societies may exist (or have existed) in which the queens do not hold absolute power over the hive, and indeed some Yanme'e societies trend toward this direction, with administrative duties variously delegated to other castes.

Members of other Covenant species tasked to interact with Yanme'e (e.g. within military units, guilds or industry) were often specifically trained for such a purpose from early on in special orders, as the peculiarities and nuances of Yanme'e psychology and communication are not easily understood or handled even with translators.

Yanme'e are not any more belligerent than other Covenant species, but there are a few things which make the Covenant nervous about a war with the Yanme'e. Due to their biology and culture:
 * Nearly all forms of Yanme'e martial arts revolve around dismemberment.
 * Dead and dying troops double as "field rations".
 * Their common language has fifteen words for "chemical warfare", most of which are derived from the root word for "efficient".
 * Drones are numerous, and, beyond specialist individuals, generally expendable. Training a good worker or engineer takes time and investment, which is why skilled individuals are not readily wasted, but the bulk of the Yanme'e hordes the Covenant faced in the Contact War were little more than kamikaze pilots and berserkers.

Queens
Queens are the dominant female members of the Yanme'e species. They serve as a hive's principal means of reproduction, but also as its leader. There is some debate as to whether the latter is for psychological or cultural reasons, but whatever the case, it has remained the predominant societal paradigm among the Yanme'e for millennia. Queens are often thought to be the most cognitively complex caste of the Yanme'e species, though the exact nature of their intelligence relative to the other castes remains under investigation. All Yanme'e queens are also not created equal. Rather than a title with specifically defined responsibilities, "queen" is best defined as a biological caste.

A Yanme'e Queen gives orders acoustically, despite possessing only a modest larynx-analogue of her own. Instead, multiple layers within each wing rub against each other to produce sounds. The larger the wings on a Queen, the louder they can shout, which gives them an edge in administrative duties. Of course, hives are built so that sound carries and workers miles away can hear their orders. Replying to those orders is trickier, but the Yanme'e have managed over the millennia. Until the invention of radio, this was accomplished through a web of steel cords strung throughout the hive, with a code of plucking and rubbing that the Queen reads with her antenna and legs. The area controlled by a hive is limited by both the flight time of drones and by the distance that a Queen’s voice can carry. Younger Queens still capable of flight often served as foremen on distant projects, though they had to land before issuing orders. Drones are technically adept and can carry out complicated orders, but have little in the way of initiative. When two equal groups of Yanme'e are fighting, the group which has a Queen or a Daughter with it enjoys a massive tactical advantage.

Since antiquity, Queens have been decorating their wings with paint and precious stones or metal. This is only partly artistic; the primary goal is akin to tuning an instrument. The stiffness and sound-propagating properties of the enamel is honed until the wings sing like a Stradivarius, and the jewels damp out unwanted harmonics characteristic of aging carapaces. Still, the bourgeois finery with which Queens have decorated themselves with is nothing short of awe-inspiring, and quality pre-Contact elytrons fetch high prices among wealthy Covenant.

As stated earlier, this all changed with the introduction of the radio, which was shortly followed by miniaturized piezoelectric sensors. Previously, Palamok was honeycombed with fiefdoms not larger than thirty kilometers across. Suddenly, a Queen could command territory hundreds of times that size, and receive information from across the planet. The resulting orgy of destruction reached a scale typically attributed to nuclear warfare. The rapid pace of radio development meant that what Yanme'e do not know about encryption, jamming, and broadcasting could fit in a short book, maybe even a pamphlet. A few decades later, the Covenant arrived in-system and attempted to recover Forerunner artifacts by force. One Queen, who survived both the Radio War and the First Contact, referred to the Radio War as “bloody and regrettable, but fairly good practice.” The Covenant on the receiving end of Yanme'e violence were suitably impressed, and the Palamok Edict still stands; the Yanme'e are not to be given interstellar communications equipment.

Now that many industries are reliant on Yanme'e labor, an uprising from Palamok would be a very long, protracted war with incalculable civilian casualties. But the drones are excellent workers, and most Queens have accepted the Covenant religion. The modern hive is a large affair, usually encompassing three or more Queens and thousands of Drones. A Queen’s elytrons are studded with sensors and transmitters to capture and disseminate their orders, though many of the Queens who undergo this augmentation lose the ability to fly. Some Queens do not give birth, but instead fulfill purely administrative duties. Some other Queens are blinded and have their wings removed, usually by the Hives which supply laborers to the Covenant.

Drones
Various castes of sexless workers and fighters are commonly generalized under the "drone" category, and make up the vast majority of the Yanme'e population. Even though it technically only applies to a specific set of castes, UNSC troops frequently use the moniker "Drone" synonymously with the overall species, as encounters with males or queens are rare.

Contrary to popular preconceptions, the drone castes are not mindless, but they are highly specialized. Part of this is due to the education regimens of Queen-led Yanme'e societies, in which individuals are rigidly specialized from an early age; in theory, a newly-hatched Yanme'e is capable of being trained to perform any number of tasks, though in modern times specialization is intentionally bred into castes such as fighters and engineers. Once again, this faces the issue of assessing "natural" behavior among the Yanme'e, as eugenics and social engineering have long altered the Yanme'e from their primeval state.

Drone cognition is peculiar and often misunderstood. All drones are self-aware individuals, albeit highly specialized to their allotted tasks by conditioning both biological and cultural. Their ability to plan or engage in self-directed goal-oriented activity is also fairly limited. Drones possess a biological compulsion to serve the needs of the colony, and although they do possess a self-preservation instinct, will give their lives without hesitation for the survival of the hive and/or queen. The extent to which drones have a sense of self or introspection are often debated by other species, as most of their activity appears to be of a mechanical nature and the types of social relations they engage in are quite basic. Still, drone workers and fighters exhibit a range of emotions, and are capable of rivalry, jealousy, or even attachment to one another. With few exceptions, the drones view their queen with almost religious reverence and respect. They are sometimes likened to biological automata more than individuals in any conventional sense, though this is likely to be an oversimplification of the situation.

It is commonly thought that a drone would go mad if forced to make complex or life-altering decisions for themselves, and concepts such as sweeping social changes or career changes are virtually unknown. Because they are fundamentally social, drones generally do not contemplate the notion of independent existence or abandoning the rest of the hive. For similar reasons, large-scale rebellions are virtually unheard of in Yanme'e history, though aberrant individuals emerge from time to time.

Drones are capable of operating independently of their queen and often do on military deployments; within the Covenant, these were usually separated into specifically trained units with their own chains of command, including drones trained to act in roles akin to officers and NCOs to groups of subordinate drones. Drones remain functional even if separated from their queen as long as their assignments remain clear; due to their fundamentally social nature, however, they grow increasingly anxious or agitated when isolated from their peer group. Additionally, drones must always have a clear idea of who is in charge; conflicting masters or orders can present challenges to their comprehension and even sanity. Boredom resulting from a lack of tasks to complete tends to be detrimental to their mental well-being as well.

Exceptions to normal drone behavior are known as Unmutuals. These individuals, by some quirk of evolution, possess a strongly defined sense of individuality and drive that goes against the system - something that usually drives them insane due to its inherent contradiction with their place in Yanme'e society, even if they are not inherently violent or psychotic. There are exceptions, however, and some Yanme'e societies make a distinction between "Autonomous" and "Unmutual", with the former type treading a fine line between a healthy drone and an Unmutual; particularly after the advent of the Covenant, such individuals have at times been used in various roles outside the hive and interacting with other species, similar to males. Overall, the "Unmutual" category encompasses a vast array of personality aberrations and disorders, which are typically lumped together by most queens out of cultural prejudice against non-conforming individuals.

Males
Yanme'e males are generally seen as more individualized than drones. They often serve in a wider variety of roles, which vary across Yanme'e societies. Some queens delegate a greater number of administrative responsibilities to males, eunuchs or specific types of drone, while in others, the queen acts more as an autocrat. Males typically serve as adjutants, aides or representatives for their queen, and the handfuls of most capable males are typically picked out as "hive princes" and various lower ranks of subordinate commander-regents to represent their queen and direct drones' operations outside the core hive, as their manner of consciousness also makes them the most suited for interacting with other species. Such roles have arisen only with the development of sapience and technology as proto-Yanme'e hives had little use for males outside reproduction.

Hives almost always have a surplus of males. Males who are not seen as necessary for any role within their home hive, are often ceremonially exiled, though some may also choose to do so voluntarily (customs depend by hive). During their exile, which may and usually will last years, they become "hiveseekers" searching for another hive to take them in, and must prove their worth with their feats and accomplishments. In their new hives, males either become suitors for the queen (who can have any number of males to mate with) or, in lesser cases, aides, representatives and sub-commanders. Powerful queens can have scores of skilled and accomplished males serving them, while lesser hives must virtually fight for the metaphorical scraps and take in hiveseekers with few claims to fame. This is a fairly ancient practice to ensure genetic diversity, though over the course of history it has assumed increasing complexity and ceremony, with different hives having their own traditions surrounding the rite. Many hiveseekers also remain as such for life, either by choice or simply a failure to be noted and taken in by a queen. These males typically serve the Covenant or its provincial states in various roles. Within hives, the castration of males deemed surplus or unfit for reproduction remains fairly common. While regarded as an indignity, becoming such an "eunuch" can at times improve the standing of a male who otherwise would have few options for social mobility.

Culture and society
The basic unit of Yanme'e society is the hive. Each hive is formed around a queen, but most hives are small and unremarkable in the grand scheme of Yanme'e or Covenant politics. While the scale of primal Yanme'e hives was limited by their ability to coordinate, the discovery of radio and other remote communications methods, along with the creation of more specialized bureaucracies, since has allowed hives to grow to enormous sizes. Although each Yanme'e hive is hard-wired toward cooperation and conformity within its own boundaries, this does not extend to other hives. Hives are naturally predisposed to distancing themselves from other hives, but since the development of sapience and complex society, they have learned to form alliances and hierarchies. In modern Yanme'e societies, powerful queens often govern multiple hives in addition to their own in a fashion akin to feudal vassals. Large hives can also have sub-hives centered on lesser queens.

Although hives share certain commonalities, they are not exempt from cultural drift. Each hive develops its own traditions over time, and their specifics of their governance and social organization differ. Polities may be formed from multiple Yanme'e hives, but all Yanme'e are not under a unified political structure. In the Covenant, these polities existed within the hegemony's pseudo-feudal system, forming their own fiefdoms. Depending on the prominence of a hive, it may answer directly to a domain's government or local of Sangheili lords. Because the Covenant hierarchy encouraged specialization of labor by species, Yanme'e hives frequently exist alongside other species, often supplying Covenant colonies with workers and technicians. Truly mixed communities are most common on the Covenant's trailward side, in the regions of space surrounding the Napret system. On some worlds such as Malurok, local Yanme'e hives have been intertwined with the local Sangheili aristocracy since antiquity in complex reciprocal relationships.

The Yanme'e readily embraced the Covenant religion, and serve as some of its most faithful adherents. Due to Yanme'e culture and psychology, the promise of godhood tends to be attractive to all the castes, and served as a powerful means for the queens to further encourage social conformity.