Bee Breeding question - What to do next

[samstar]

So I have recently got properly into bees but have run into a problem. I have an industrious princess and a drone but are both industrious-dilligent hybrids and last time I bred them together I ended up with diligent princess and drones. So was wondering what other people do in this situation. Maybe use extra bees machines to extract the genes? Or risk breeding then together ?
Also the indexer crashes my game when I try to open it even though there are no bees inside it...any help on that appreciated

 

[Bomb Bloke]

I've heard of the indexer causing crashes whenever more then 1024 bees are placed inside, but none is a new one on me.

Frankly I'm of the impression that if you think you need the sort of bee storage the indexer provides you're doing it wrong. Breed your bees until your drones and princesses match exactly, and then all future drones produced will stack together. That's two item slots per bee species. Other drones that aren't stacking can go into the gene pool, recycler, or in my case, the lake. Ditto for any drones produced once your stacks hit the 64 item cap.

If you have the advanced machines, breed a few wintry (or perhaps majestic) bees until you've got a few spare drones, then run them through the isolator to get the max fertility trait. Apply that to your hybrids and breed them together again.

Even if you don't get the pures you're after, odds are most of what you get back will have the industrious trait, allowing you to throw the drones into the isolator with little risk. Or you could just keep breeding the princess with industrious hybrids until you've collected a few pures, then keep breeding the princess with those pures until it's also pure.

You could put the hybrid drone you have right now into the isolator, but there's a decent chance it'll be killed by it before you get the serum you want and then you'll have no industrious drones at all. Certainly don't put the princess in there, drones are rather more expendable!

Either way, if you CAN get those hybrids to maximum fertility, then doing that and letting them breed at least once is a good start.

 

[Bibble]

Certainly for the first main branches (industrial, imperial, etc.), my strategy was to set up a number of apiaries (about 10, usually), with apiarists pipes (from just random breeding), and put 2 different bees in them. For example, if I have no advanced bees, I'll put in a forest princess and meadows drone (or vice versa), otherwise, I'll go as far up the tree as I can. Then I leave them breeding and repeating for a few hours. Typically you will have some success, otherwise, add in a particular drone (if you have a diligent line that's purified itself, add a cultivated).

When you have purified, repeating versions of industrial and imperial, then you can start looking at Alvearies and mutators, and the similar. Also, ensure that you keep a stack of drones for any valuable bees (end-lines, and common mutables). The species serums are nice, but it's better to be able to replicate all traits of a species.

If you're interested, my main target after the initial 2 lines is to get max traits on a bee, usually involving finding the species, and getting the serums from them. Once I have an optimised bee, I'll rebreed the drones (put say, a stack of 10 in the drone slot and cycle a junk princess until she is a pure-bred), and apply the species serum of choice for the product, and possibly add an effect serum for circumstance. That's how I have a set of 8 purifying and nodifying bees surrounding my TC3 workshop node, producing all the shards, as well as the pollen/jelly needed for alvearies.

 

[Deor]

There is a bug that means you crash the first time you use an indexer, its usually fine after that. It will also crash if you have an excessive number of bees in one, but you can still extract them from it with a wooden pipe.

I use it as a buffer before they go to my gene pool, if my DNA tank is full.

Sent from my Paranoid Android

 

[samstar]

I've heard of the indexer causing crashes whenever more then 1024 bees are placed inside, but none is a new one on me.

Frankly I'm of the impression that if you think you need the sort of bee storage the indexer provides you're doing it wrong. Breed your bees until your drones and princesses match exactly, and then all future drones produced will stack together. That's two item slots per bee species. Other drones that aren't stacking can go into the gene pool, recycler, or in my case, the lake. Ditto for any drones produced once your stacks hit the 64 item cap.

If you have the advanced machines, breed a few wintry (or perhaps majestic) bees until you've got a few spare drones, then run them through the isolator to get the max fertility trait. Apply that to your hybrids and breed them together again.

Even if you don't get the pures you're after, odds are most of what you get back will have the industrious trait, allowing you to throw the drones into the isolator with little risk. Or you could just keep breeding the princess with industrious hybrids until you've collected a few pures, then keep breeding the princess with those pures until it's also pure.

You could put the hybrid drone you have right now into the isolator, but there's a decent chance it'll be killed by it before you get the serum you want and then you'll have no industrious drones at all. Certainly don't put the princess in there, drones are rather more expendable!

Either way, if you CAN get those hybrids to maximum fertility, then doing that and letting them breed at least once is a good start.

This is my first time breeding and so I have an apiaries chests full of pure bees and a diamond chest for hybrids of all sorts. So you would suggest getting rid most of these bees and just keeping the ones that stack? As for the random hybrids I have in the diamond chest, what would you do with these?
As for the indexer problems I too havnt found a case where having no bees in it causes crashes.[DOUBLEPOST=1367311076][/DOUBLEPOST]

There is a bug that means you crash the first time you use an indexer, its usually fine after that. It will also crash if you have an excessive number of bees in one, but you can still extract them from it with a wooden pipe.

I use it as a buffer before they go to my gene pool, if my DNA tank is full.

Sent from my Paranoid Android

What do you mean by first time because I have tried opening it more than once and also tried breaking and replacing with still no luck

 

[Deor]

Just that. Place it, open it and you crash, load up again and open it again and its fine. Ive not had a problem with time since. Well, not until I went on holiday for a week and left it catching the overspill of bees from my production hives, that was a little messy, but the wooden pipe trick worked and I now have a LOT of spare DNA.

 

[Bomb Bloke]

This is my first time breeding and so I have an apiaries chests full of pure bees and a diamond chest for hybrids of all sorts. So you would suggest getting rid most of these bees and just keeping the ones that stack? As for the random hybrids I have in the diamond chest, what would you do with these?

Yes, I recommend ditching all the drones that don't stack. Of those that do stack, you would preferably keep the ones that match your princess of that species. You need only have one princess and one stack of drones for each race. There's somewhere less then 120 races all up, so you can see why an indexer is not only overkill but an outright trap: it encourages you to keep all your drones, and the result is you have so many that you can never find the ones that're worth using. The answer is to only ever keep the drones that're worth using.

Drones won't stack if even one single trait on them miss-matches, and even then, on (very) rare occasions they won't stack anyway. The way to go is to breed, check the results with the beealyser, breed the drone that matches the princess most closely, check the results, again breed the princess with the most closely matching drone, and repeat until all drones produced are stacking (simply discard ALL the other drones). Then breed until your stack is up to at least thirty odd drones and, if you have any others left, discard ALL the other drones of that species - pure, hybrid, whatever, just get rid of them. Being able to inoculate the maximum fertility and shortest lifespan traits onto your bees helps enormously with this process, so if you don't already have them, set a beeline towards imperials: They're required to make the serums needed for genetic engineering. Those should also be the first bees you put into an alveary (followed closely by industrious), because the dripping combs they produce are absolutely essential for keeping your supplies of honey up (the dew and drops that come from those combs can be used interchangeably in the squeezer and beealyser, and the dew is guaranteed from every comb).

Oh, and note that the beealyser can do up to 64 bees with a single drop of honey - assuming they're stacked. Now consider that analysed bees are worth more liquid DNA...

When you actually come to use a species for something - say to create another species somewhere down the track - grab the relevant drone stack, and start breeding a princess with it. Doesn't matter what princess (it can be a new marble princess you just plucked from a remote hive somewhere), just keep breeding it with drones from that stack over and over, and eventually it'll match all their traits (race, speed, whatever) and start producing new drones you can add to the stack. Keeping going until the stack's numbers are replenished. In this way, you can always keep your old "reserve" princess that matches that stack, because the new princess is about to turn into some other new race.

Again, try to get maximum fertility and shortest lifespan on all your bees. The fertility trait in particular is essential. Investing in apiarist pipes is very well worth the diamonds required, as these make it trivial to turn a small stack of drones into a large one, and one such pipe can manage multiple apiaries (so long as the bees are all of different species).

 

[slay_mithos]

Your starter kit with bees: http://mc.nessirojgaming.eu/bees/index.php?title=Main_Page

I personally did it a bit differently than what I read here, so I'm going to write it too.

First, I bred in apiaries with soul frames to get the industrious and the imperial.

At each step, I would stop and try to get a pure couple, and run them in an automated apiary.

Once I got the industrious and imperial, I would put impregnated frames with them, so that they produce the most possible.

From there, making empty serums, and getting serums for every single traits once was my priority.

I then set up a few breeding alviaries (16 frame housing, 6 chocolate frames and up to 10 soul frames), and the breeding itself became way easier. It does cost a lot of resources, and you might get 2 alviaries going before going for that setup, and use those to produce royal jelly and pollen.

The two basic nether branches are also very easy to breed with basic apiary+soul frames, and they provide with easy lava, glowstone, ash and blaze powder. If you ever intend to use lava energy, those bees are really good for transforming a bit of sand/dirt/cobble and energy into lava, at a lesser cost than the magma crucible.
Even a high production level is possible with this, with a couple alviaries, and you won't have to drain the nether and your fps there.

After you got your basics and the ability to get serums, all you really need is to know what to breed with what, and to have a decent number of hive bees to convert to whatever species you need at the time. The Twilight forest is a very good place to get a lot of marbled drones, desert and tundra are really good sources of their bees too, as hives can be spotted from afar.