Never Enter an Elf Hive's Nursery

Multiple elf species live in hives, including but not limited to night, fire and steel elves. These hives are generally very heavily guarded, as a breach in their defences may expose the hive's queen to attackers.

There's also the matter of the hive's nursery (or nurseries, plural) being at risk. Future broods are essential to the survival of a hive, and without eggs, grubs and larvae the hive will die out.

But despite their appearance and immaturity, elf grubs are not completely defenceless. Large broods are ravenous and will swarm anything that makes the mistake of wandering into their nursery and doesn't possess the correct pheromones that mark them out as members of the hive.

Night elf grubs are taught how to feed themselves almost the instant that they hatch. They're fed a slurry mixture of blood nectar and raw meat for the first few hours of their lives before quickly weening off into chunks of raw meat. Learning to tear it into digestible pieces is one of the first lessons a night elf is ever taught, and they instinctively go at it with gusto. Before long they graduate into tearing up live prey brought in by the hive's hunters, and this is where the danger lies. Very often, immature and overzealous grubs will mistake anything not considered a member of the hive a meal, and no amount of coaxing will deter them from crawling over a person and tering them apart chunk by chunk.