Bee Breeding Questions

[Brian Cherrick]

Have a couple questions since I started looking into breeding.

I ultimately want to go to using Alviary's and know that I need Royal Jelly/Pollen and so forth to make it. I know what bees I need to breed to get Imperial/Industrious bees. The questions I have are as follows:

1. Is there anything I can do to increase the chance of a successful mutation/breed cycle?
2. Anything I can do to increase the chance I'd get certain byproducts such as propolis?
3. Is there anything I can do to get a specific bee, such as going from cultivated to noble, instead of diligent?

It should be noted that I have the DW20 pack, and do have gendustry added to it.

 

[Svangen]

(1) Soul Frames, though I may be wrong on that. Assuming, though, that you're a Dire fan like I am, you should wait Saturday, he should release his episode then with Bee Mutations and should say what to use to encourage mutations. It also should come out at 7am sharp.
(2-3) Not in Vanilla Forestry, but you can in Gendustry (which I now you don't have).


Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

 

[rhn]

Have a couple questions since I started looking into breeding.

I ultimately want to go to using Alviary's and know that I need Royal Jelly/Pollen and so forth to make it. I know what bees I need to breed to get Imperial/Industrious bees. The questions I have are as follows:

1. Is there anything I can do to increase the chance of a successful mutation/breed cycle?
2. Anything I can do to increase the chance I'd get certain byproducts such as propolis?
3. Is there anything I can do to get a specific bee, such as going from cultivated to noble, instead of diligent?

It should be noted that I have the DW20 pack, and do have gendustry added to it.

1. Soul frames in apiary/alveary or Mutator block with catalyst in an alveary.

2. Untreated, Impregnated, Proven or Magic frames will double production per frame used. And effect is multiplicative so two frames is x4 production, tree frames is x8 production and so on. All the mentioned frames have the 200% production chance, difference is durability.

3. In the case of Noble/Diligent, no there is nothing you can do to ensure getting the one you want. But luckily this is one of VERY few where there are several outcomes of the same two species. It is a little annoying step you just need to get over, and from then on its smooth sailing.


Another trick to speeding up breeding bees is to use 3x Chocolate frames to reduce the lifespan of the bees while you are "purifying" the breed you just got from using Soul frames.

 

[Brian Cherrick]

1. Soul frames in apiary/alveary or Mutator block with catalyst in an alveary.

2. Untreated, Impregnated, Proven or Magic frames will double production per frame used. And effect is multiplicative so two frames is x4 production, tree frames is x8 production and so on. All the mentioned frames have the 200% production chance, difference is durability.

3. In the case of Noble/Diligent, no there is nothing you can do to ensure getting the one you want. But luckily this is one of VERY few where there are several outcomes of the same two species. It is a little annoying step you just need to get over, and from then on its smooth sailing.


Another trick to speeding up breeding bees is to use 3x Chocolate frames to reduce the lifespan of the bees while you are "purifying" the breed you just got from using Soul frames.

What do you mean by purifying? I'm lost here .... how do you do that exactly?

Wouldn't a specific queen have only those specifics traits? Like wouldn't a cultivated only have the cultivated traits unless I bred it with say a common to get the noble. Would the noble have the traits of both those breeds, or does it only take on 1 of them?

 

[asb3pe]

I've never used Gendustry, I think I'd consider it cheat nah nevermind that's not fair, I'd consider it too easy to blast thru bees. I enjoy the grind it takes every new modpack I play, believe it or not - always one of my favorite grinds.

1. Yep use soul frames in your apiaries while working your way up the ladder to imperial/industrious, it improves the chances of getting a successful mutation.
2. Propolis is difficult at first, and I value each one greatly along the way because every two of them makes one apiarist's pipe, the true key to "bee automation" (for making stacks of drones and such).
3. This is why you need apiarist's pipe, and hence propolis. After many tries, when I finally get a princess and a drone for a new species, I run them over and over in an apiary to make a stack of the new species' drones. Then since I run a quarry and get a nice surplus of Rocky Bees, I use that stack of drones to convert a Rocky princess into a princess of the new species - just put them in an apiary that feeds back into itself and let it run until all the drones are stacking in the apiary (if that doesn't make sense, come back in a week and it probably will). Now you have a ready supply of princesses and drones of the new species. That's one rung, now onto the next rung of the ladder.

Edit: rhn right again... yes - forgot to mention, use chocolate frames when not going for a mutation (when making stacks of drones and cloning princesses). Those are the frames that shorten the bee's lifespan, not the soul frames (I made a mistake in my post, corrected it).

 

[rhn]

What do you mean by purifying? I'm lost here .... how do you do that exactly?

Wouldn't a specific queen have only those specifics traits? Like wouldn't a cultivated only have the cultivated traits unless I bred it with say a common to get the noble. Would the noble have the traits of both those breeds, or does it only take on 1 of them?

Sorry. By purified I mean a princess and drone with identical species and traits to each other and on both sides. This way there is no longer any chance for any change and automation is VERY simple. You know that you will get completely identical drones every time and as long as you don't analyse them, they will automatically stack.

I've never used Gendustry, I think I'd consider it cheat nah nevermind that's not fair, I'd consider it too easy to blast thru bees. I enjoy the grind it takes every new modpack I play, believe it or not - always one of my favorite grinds.

1. Yep use soul frames in your apiaries while working your way up the ladder to imperial/industrious, it improves the chances of getting a successful mutation.
2. Propolis is difficult at first, and I value each one greatly along the way because every two of them makes one apiarist's pipe, the true key to "bee automation" (for making stacks of drones and such).
3. This is why you need apiarist's pipe, and hence propolis. After many tries, when I finally get a princess and a drone for a new species, I run them over and over in an apiary to make a stack of the new species' drones. Then since I run a quarry and get a nice surplus of Rocky Bees, I use that stack of drones to convert a Rocky princess into a princess of the new species - just put them in an apiary that feeds back into itself and let it run until all the drones are stacking in the apiary (if that doesn't make sense, come back in a week and it probably will). Now you have a ready supply of princesses and drones of the new species. That's one rung, now onto the next rung of the ladder.

Edit: rhn right again... yes - forgot to mention, use chocolate frames when not going for a mutation (when making stacks of drones and cloning princesses). Those are the frames that shorten the bee's lifespan, not the soul frames (I made a mistake in my post, corrected it).

Ehm, I have never in the time I have done bee breeding used an apiarist pipe. Never saw the reason for it. A normal Diamond Pipe will do just fine for automating apiaries/alvearies. Only place where I could see a apiarist pipe to be of use would be in automated crossbreeding. But I prefer doing that by hand so..

 

[asb3pe]

What do you mean by purifying? I'm lost here .... how do you do that exactly?

Wouldn't a specific queen have only those specifics traits? Like wouldn't a cultivated only have the cultivated traits unless I bred it with say a common to get the noble. Would the noble have the traits of both those breeds, or does it only take on 1 of them?

Use the beealyzer with honey drops (which will also be in short supply at first) to examine the bees, but yeah, when you suddenly get a new species that's pure, you'll know it. Just get one pure princess, and one pure drone, and then follow my #3 above. It might take 15 or 25 tries at first, before you have one of each. When I say it's a grind, it's a grind. LOL But I love bees nonetheless. So satisfying when you finally get there.

Also, ExtraBees machines are a super huge help, I don't consider then to be drastically circumventing the whole bee process like Gendustry seems to do. But having all the species and bee traits in serum vials just makes everything so much neater, cleaner, simpler and easier in my opinion. The hardest part of bees is getting to Imp/Ind, once you have the pollen and jelly and can make the ExtraBees machines you can just kinda roll downhill with it from there.

 

[rhn]

Use the beealyzer with honey drops (which will also be in short supply at first) to examine the bees, but yeah, when you suddenly get a new species that's pure, you'll know it. Just get one pure princess, and one pure drone, and then follow my #3 above. It might take 15 or 25 tries at first, before you have one of each. When I say it's a grind, it's a grind. LOL But I love bees nonetheless. So satisfying when you finally get there.

You really don't have to keep crossbreeding till you have a pure princess and drone. You can just cross hybrids and selectively breed them until you only got the species you want and continue till the traits are stable. This is usually much faster/easier than wasting up to 25 princesses on getting that one pure one out. And once you have the ExB machines I find myself "cleaning up" the traits anyway, so dont really care about getting the "pure stats".

 

[asb3pe]

Ehm, I have never in the time I have done bee breeding used an apiarist pipe. Never saw the reason for it. A normal Diamond Pipe will do just fine for automating apiaries/alvearies. Only place where I could see a apiarist pipe to be of use would be in automated crossbreeding. But I prefer doing that by hand so..

Yeah not sure why I never thought to use diamond pipe. I put a row of 20 apiaries down in a row and tie em all together with apiarist pipe and send all the combs down the line to a chest at the end of the row. Plus all the drones that don't stack go there too. I set the aparist pipe to "Any Bees" for the direction back into the apiary to cycle em repeatedly. When I clone princesses, I go to town. LOL I make up to 20 at once this way, which is smack dab in the middle of my "15-25 tries" statement.

You really don't have to keep crossbreeding till you have a pure princess and drone. You can just cross hybrids and selectively breed them until you only got the species you want and continue till the traits are stable. This is usually much faster/easier than wasting up to 25 princesses on getting that one pure one out. And once you have the ExB machines I find myself "cleaning up" the traits anyway, so dont really care about getting the "pure stats".

I never could get that method to work. If I used hybrids, I'd get hybrids, and could never work them into "pure" species. So yeah... my method is more like the tortoise from the fable... slow and steady wins the race, or at least, it gets me to where I want to finish... eventually.

Oh, and the princesses aren't wasted... every princess can always be "recycled" by changing it's species into any other species. All you need is a stack of drones from that species (which is why my storage always has at least one stack for each species, if I get lower than that I make more).

 

[rhn]

Yeah not sure why I never thought to use diamond pipe. I put a row of 20 apiaries down in a row and tie em all together with apiarist pipe and send all the combs down the line to a chest at the end of the row. Plus all the drones that don't stack go there too. I set the aparist pipe to "Any Bees" for the direction back into the apiary to cycle em repeatedly. When I clone princesses, I go to town. LOL I make up to 20 at once this way, which is smack dab in the middle of my "15-25 tries" statement.



I never could get that method to work. If I used hybrids, I'd get hybrids, and could never work them into "pure" species. So yeah... my method is more like the tortoise from the fable... slow and steady wins the race, or at least, it gets me to where I want to finish... eventually.

Oh, and the princesses aren't wasted... every princess can always be "recycled" by changing it's species into any other species. All you need is a stack of drones from that species (which is why my storage always has at least one stack for each species, if I get lower than that I make more).

Actually need to point out, that the BC pipes in 1.6 will delete any contents in them during server/world restarts. So I have actually gone over to using Itemducts instead now due to playing in singleplayer and loosing way too many princesses that way.

 

[asb3pe]

Actually need to point out, that the BC pipes in 1.6 will delete any contents in them during server/world restarts. So I have actually gone over to using Itemducts instead now due to playing in singleplayer and loosing way too many princesses that way.

Yep, I changed my 49 alveary array (7x7) to use all AE import and export busses... that's one export bus on every single frame housing block - average of 4 frame housings per alveary means 200 export busses. LOL

This was for the same reason, I lost a pair of bees that were apparently cycling thru the pipes while I shut down my SSP world... ugh.

But quite honestly, for the OP's questions about working up to imperial/industrious, the pipes are the only way to go. I'm getting off track. If diamond pipes work, great, because propolis is in extremely short supply for the majority of the process. Once you hit Imp/Ind, everything changes.

 

[rhn]

Yep, I changed my 49 alveary array (7x7) to use all AE import and export busses... that's one export bus on every single frame housing block - average of 4 frame housings per alveary means 200 export busses. LOL

Lol.
Two words: Factorization Router!

Using the level emitter to turn off the use of frames for the Alveary once bee produce reaches chosen levels.
If you don't want this level on control for each Alveary, you can just connect all the Alvearies up with some dummy Barrels(or some other cheap inventory) and use a single Router to supply frames to every single Alveary.

 

[Lordlundar]

3. Is there anything I can do to get a specific bee, such as going from cultivated to noble, instead of diligent?

It should be noted that I have the DW20 pack, and do have gendustry added to it.

So just to clarify, you do have gendustry installed?

If so, then you can build an advance mutator which will allow you to select what mutation happens.

 

[Brian Cherrick]

So just to clarify, you do have gendustry installed?

If so, then you can build an advance mutator which will allow you to select what mutation happens.

I do, and I will look into that right now.

 

[Brian Cherrick]

Lol.
Two words: Factorization Router!

Using the level emitter to turn off the use of frames for the Alveary once bee produce reaches chosen levels.
If you don't want this level on control for each Alveary, you can just connect all the Alvearies up with some dummy Barrels(or some other cheap inventory) and use a single Router to supply frames to every single Alveary.

Need to get to the point where I have alviaries before I worry about how I'm automating them

 

[Brian Cherrick]

Yeah not sure why I never thought to use diamond pipe. I put a row of 20 apiaries down in a row and tie em all together with apiarist pipe and send all the combs down the line to a chest at the end of the row. Plus all the drones that don't stack go there too. I set the aparist pipe to "Any Bees" for the direction back into the apiary to cycle em repeatedly. When I clone princesses, I go to town. LOL I make up to 20 at once this way, which is smack dab in the middle of my "15-25 tries" statement.



I never could get that method to work. If I used hybrids, I'd get hybrids, and could never work them into "pure" species. So yeah... my method is more like the tortoise from the fable... slow and steady wins the race, or at least, it gets me to where I want to finish... eventually.

Oh, and the princesses aren't wasted... every princess can always be "recycled" by changing it's species into any other species. All you need is a stack of drones from that species (which is why my storage always has at least one stack for each species, if I get lower than that I make more).

Where I am stuck at is getting a lot of the princesses I need. For example, when my current cycle for my first imperial finishes mutating, I am going to have 1 princess, and 1-2 drones. Put 1+1 in to make another queen , and it's rinse repeat. How do I get to the point where I can have several imperial queens going at once?

 

[GreenZombie]

Where I am stuck at is getting a lot of the princesses I need. For example, when my current cycle for my first imperial finishes mutating, I am going to have 1 princess, and 1-2 drones. Put 1+1 in to make another queen , and it's rinse repeat. How do I get to the point where I can have several imperial queens going at once?

Search the world for more breeding stock.

 

[rhn]

Where I am stuck at is getting a lot of the princesses I need. For example, when my current cycle for my first imperial finishes mutating, I am going to have 1 princess, and 1-2 drones. Put 1+1 in to make another queen , and it's rinse repeat. How do I get to the point where I can have several imperial queens going at once?

Once you have bred one princes plus one drone of a new species and they are stable(same traits on both sides and both bees), you just breed them again and again and again to produce more and more drones. Once you have 10-12 drones you take those away from the princess and add those to a new princess(other species that is easy to come by, Rocky princess is a very good choice for renewable princess). Over time with repeatedly breeding the Rocky princess with the Imperial drones for example, the Rocky princess will turn into a complete copy of the Imperial princess/drones.

The way I prefer to do this is:
First I set up an automated apiary. Usually a wooden pipe pulling bees and produce out, going down into a diamond pipe underneath the apiary which sends princes and drones up and anything unspecified down(leave the down direction blank)(or use Itemducts as mentioned earlier).
Now it is important that the drones in the apiary are not analysed or they will not stack. Once there is enough I put 12-13 of them together with a Rocky princess(still haven't analysed the drones!) in another automated Apiary and leave them there to breed continuously. Smart thing is now that princess will always be put back into the apiary to breed with the stack of drones, but the drones will be discarded if they don't stack with the ones already in the apiary. So expect the stack of drones in the apiary to go down from 13 to 7-8ish some times due to the drones produced being incompatible. But eventually the princess will become identical to the stack of drones and the stack of drones will start to go up. I have selected a "success trigger" that I put in 13 drones, and once there is 20 drones in the apiary the Princess is done(I do make sure to analyse the princess though just to be safe). (You cant just say that once there is 13 again it is done, as a non-stable princess can occasionally produce the right set of traits on the drones by chance).

Now you just repeat this process until you have enough of the desired princess'. If you need to copy bees with low fertility(only spawning 1 drone) this process wont work and you will need to modify the traits first to give it higher fertility(can be done through ExB machines once you reach Imperial/Industrious).

You should set up an area for this copying with rows of automated apiaries. This is where I do it in my current build:

I cross-breed the bees in the Alveary top left, do manual "selective purification/stabilization" in the 5 apiaries to the right of it. The 3 rows of 5 apiaries I then use to copy bees. I usually make 5 of each species, 1 for production and 4 for storage. This way I can be copying 3 species at the same time(actually have 2 more rows of 5 off shot, but you get the point).

 

[jdog1408]

I have no idea what I did I was trying to get diamandi bees (I have gendustry, forestry and extrabees) but somewhere along the line I got imperials which were a necessity to advance further into gendustry. I remember it was cultivated + something but I couldn't find a breeding that used cultivated to directly make inperials I don't know what it was but I did end up get diamandi in the end which are not nearly as fast as MFR laser drill for diamonds but I think it uses less energy per. Plus if you put them in a forestry apiary you only need frames to get them.
Sent from my SCH-I930 using Tapatalk