In modern-day China in the Yiwei village, a boy knocks down a wasp nest with a stone and finds that, when boiled in water, the wasp’s nest reveals itself to be full of intricate maps. As the Yiwei villagers begin to copiously boil wasp nests to find these maps, the surviving cartographer wasps set out to start a new colony. This colony, full of wasps well-versed in science, mathematics, and map-making, starts a monarchy with their foundress as its ruler. To establish their new monarchy, the wasps exercise reign over a local beehive, forcing the bees into labor and production for their benefit. While the bees suffer under the reign of the cartographer wasps, the wasps begin to educate the bees as assistants in their knowledge production and cartography excursions.  One of the bee assistants is an anarchist and secretly incubates her twenty sons in the wasp’s nest, feeding them and teaching them all of her knowledge of cartography, science, and mathematics until they hatch. After the anarchist bee has passed away, her sons secretly join the hive and mate with the bee queen, creating a strain of anarchist bees. Before they pass away, they inscribe their story on the hive in secret lettering.  The new anarchist bees question the nature of their monarchical captivity and the hegemonic reign of the wasps over their beehive. The bees, armed with their teachings from the wasps, fly away to build a new society without a monarchy or hierarchical rule of any kind. In a parallel timeline, a woman-- the sister of the boy who threw the rock-- returns to their Yiwei farm to find all of the wasps' nests destroyed, and sets off to find the remaining Yiwei cartographer wasps.  The anarchist bees build a new hive just before winter sets in, bringing with them the larvae of other bees and a new mother bee, who hatch and work alongside the anarchist bees to construct a new city. They descend into hibernation. In the alternate timeline, the young woman finds the wasps who have reigned over the beehive and takes the nest for scientific study. The bees in the old beehive, upon waking in spring, discover that the wasps have left; as they patrol to search for answers, they happen upon the new beehive without a queen and begin to read the anarchist bee’s inscriptions of revolution.