Queen Bee

Queen Bee is a long range Emitter Quirk from My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, debuting in Chapter 5 and in that series' Episode 3. Rather than belonging to a person, it belongs to a parasitic insect, so the ability changes hands only by changing hosts. Kuin Hachisuka carried it first, riding inside Tamao Oguro. Years later the same lineage resurfaced as Bee☆Pop, seated inside Kazuho Haneyama. It stands among the very few Quirks held by an animal, a bracket it shares with the Monster Cat's eponymous power and with High Specs, which belongs to Nezu.

Possession begins with the bee tunnelling through an eye socket and linking to the host's brain, after which she owns their body and their actions outright. The host's own Quirk comes with the package, as Bee☆Pop showed by drawing on Kazuho's Leap. A swarm nests behind a medical patch over the host's left eye, numerous enough to blanket an entire metropolitan area. Each bee carries a compartment in its abdomen for ferrying small quantities of any substance, and its stinger works as a syringe, good for injecting drugs or contaminants and for drawing samples out. Kuin used that to borrow a second Quirk temporarily, having her bees inject her with Teruo Unagisawa's blood so she could wield Electric Eel. The swarm doubles as a spy network, and it feeds her everything it sees, since she is bound bio-physically to every insect in it.

While she inhabits a host, the Queen's personality becomes a blend of the swarm and the host's own mind, which is why Bee☆Pop kept the voice and the sunny disposition that belonged to Pop☆Step while aiming both at levelling neighborhoods. Trigger complicates the arrangement: a dosed host gains sharp jumps in strength and speed and darkens in appearance, though Tamao grew claw-like nails while Kazuho instead showed the typical blackened tongue. The drug also loosens the parasite's hold on the host's buried consciousness, which let Tamao's feelings toward her father, Knuckleduster, briefly surface even as the Queen kept command. Survival is engineered in as well. Should the Queen die, a surviving bee can succeed her and rebuild, given time to recover strength, and the reborn version can surpass what came before; Bee☆Pop deployed whole swarms of Bomb Bees where Kuin could risk only one genuine specimen without destroying her host.

The weaknesses trace to that same connection. Every bee hurt or killed sends pain recoiling into Kuin, so she prefers flight to confrontation, a limitation Bee☆Pop does not share. As an insect she depends on a functioning host brain for thought itself, meaning a dying host costs her both her reasoning and her control, and prying her true body loose leaves her helpless. The bees are fragile against large-scale attacks: Moyuru Tochi burned a swarm down with Ignition to save Soga Kugisaki, and Endeavor incinerated several of Bee☆Pop's with Hellflame. They chase pheromones, which Knuckleduster used to lure them onto a makeshift bomb and Koichi used to slip away behind a smoke bomb. Strong emotion can crack the hold too. Recovery afterward is severe; the host's left eye is destroyed, and Kazuho spent at least a year in intensive care. The named technique is Bomb Bees, explosives that detonate on command, though under Kuin only the first was ever real and the rest amounted to firecrackers.

Kuin Hachisuka took Tamao Oguro as her host years earlier, then walked the stolen body home and attacked the girl's mother, an act that left Iwao, Tamao's father, entirely bewildered. Her day job was the Villain Factory, the outfit answering to All For One: she pushed Trigger at street level, logged what happened to the Instant Villains it produced, and scouted anyone worth remaking as a Next-Level Villain. She survived by murdering entire households, then treating the dead as both larder and nest for her swarm while living off the victims' stolen credit cards until the money ran dry. Knuckleduster ended her: cornered, she dosed herself with Trigger and readied an entire swarm of genuine Bomb Bees, a move that would have cost Tamao her life, but a Taser Knuckle to the chest stopped Tamao's heart and severed her link to the swarm. He pulled Kuin from his daughter's eye, destroyed her with an explosive, and revived Tamao with CPR.

One bee survived. Number 6 caught it and spent roughly three years nurturing it into a new queen, then, posing as Rokuro Nomura, befriended Kazuho Haneyama and lured her to the hive, producing Bee☆Pop. She announced herself with an explosive performance, bombing buildings while belting out a remixed jingle lifted from the Marukane Department Store and hijacking nearby devices to broadcast the show as widely as she could. Reviewers of the wreckage reached back three years for a comparison, putting it alongside the Kaiju rampage staged by Ryuichi Gojiyama, and the authorities branded Pop☆Step a villain despite her being a minor with no prior offense. Beneath the showmanship sat a fixation on Koichi and a need never to be forgotten by him. At their second confrontation she tried to end her own life with Bomb Bees so he would carry the failure forever, but Koichi broke the parasite's grip. Number 6 then shot Kazuho with Trigger, prompting the Queen and her swarm to self-destruct and erase the evidence. Midnight put the bee to sleep with Somnambulist, and it was later extracted safely at a hospital.