SWARM

 

SWARM

Real Name: Fritz von Meyer

First Appearance: Champions (Vol. 1) #14, July 1977

Powers: Fritz von Meyer is a Nazi war criminal/entomologist now comprised of bees. His insect experiments uncovered a hyper-intelligent colony of bees in South America, apparently mutated by an irradiated meteor. Dr. von Meyer antagonized the bees into attacking him and was consumed by them, but managed to sustain his consciousness through a psychic connection to the mutated queen bee. Reduced to nothing more than a skeleton, Fritz animated himself as a human-shaped mass of bees surrounding his irradiated bones, calling himself Swarm.

 

Swarm was functionally resistant to most form of physical injury. The mass of bees that made up his body could move aside to avoid attack, and the death of individual bees when struck by blades or fire only momentarily incapacitated him, as his queen could rapidly produce new offspring to repopulate his form. Swarm was mentally connected to all his bees and received all their sensory input, allowing him to send out drones as scouts or spies over great distances. The exact distance Swarm could dispatch drones away from the main hive is unknown, but they could apparently cross continents and remain connected to him. Swarm could "fire" bees at his opponents, sending off large quantities of bees to sting his victims. At times, he has demonstrated the ability to assimilate other bees into his hive, greatly increasing the number of bees under his control, and increasing his relative mass to achieve superhuman size and strength. Normally, the colony that comprises Swarm's body is roughly 220,000 mutated bees at any given time, though he has controlled up to 2 billion on occasion.

Recently, he even demonstrated the ability to create additional humanoid constructs of bees, including a set of doppelgangers to fight the Mighty Avengers. Swarm is occasionally depicted as dependent on his queen bee and irradiated human skeleton to maintain his form and his control over the bees, but this isn't always the case. Sometimes his radioactive psyche can name a new queen, and establish a new colony to contain his consciousness, even without his skeleton.

The bees possess sentience and awareness approaching that of a human, as well as an acquired "killer instinct", and are powerful enough to sting through normal apiculturist protective garb. When independent of Swarm's control, the bees will revert to their more pacifistic lifestyle. They're vulnerable to insecticides, have a natural enmity towards arachnids, and are able to ingest synthetics by rapidly eating through it. They can rapidly assemble giant hives large enough to engulf buildings within minutes, and can build honeycomb walls durable enough to withstand blows from even demigod beings such as Hercules, reinforcing them from their side faster than their opponents can inflict damage from the other side. The queen bees are moderately telepathic, able to communicate feelings to sensitive humans.

Fritz von Meyer is a gifted intellect with Ph.D.'s in both toxicology and entomology. Highly skilled in both fields and apiculture, he is also a passable roboticist, able to build gigantic radio-controlled mechanical bees. These constructs have sufficient strength to fly while carrying full-sized humans and are armed with powerful short-range energy stings to stun or kill opponents.