Sunpetal

Sunpetals are broad, bright-yellow flowers that follow the path of Tauria's sun throughout the day — slowly, silently, their faces turning from east to west as the hours pass. Their wide circular petals maximise light absorption and warmth, and the bees of Tauria — slightly larger than Earth bees, their hum pitched half an octave lower — gather around Sunpetal fields in numbers that can be heard before they can be seen.

Enki cultivates Sunpetal borders around every food crop in Alcyone's fields. The honey produced by Taurian bees working Sunpetal pollen has an amber colour and a faint mineral quality — the taste of the planet itself, distilled through a flower and a bee.

Giliad's Field Note

Dendera tasted the first Sunpetal honey at the Festival and said it was 'tolerable.' From Dendera, this is equivalent to most people declaring something the finest thing they have encountered in living memory. The bees do not sting unless the flowers are physically threatened. I know this now. I did not know it on Day 11. — G.