Bee Breeding Thread.

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Rakankrad

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Sengir! <3

Wondering if you're the one that made the extra biomes get the temps and humidity they have? If so, was it planned that glacial hives spawn into icy wastelands but can't be bred there? I don't mind having to add the tolerances for them, but having to do my breeding in a mystcraft age to get the Arid tolerance into them is slightly annoying :(
 

Zjarek_S

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Jul 29, 2019
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Temperature and humidity is vanilla MC thing, it is for example responsible for grass color. EBXL just adds their values. It is messing a bit with bees, for example Nether currently is hot, not hellish, so sinister bee with 0 tolerance to temperature won't work there, or anywhere else.
 

EternalDensity

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Jul 29, 2019
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I must admit that my current progress with bees is that I've found some bees, aviaries, and frames in various dungeons and villages, but haven't had the time to actually do anything with them yet. That's one of the 'problems'* I'm having with using a modpack: there's so much content to explore! But I'm sure this thread will be handy once I get started.

*i.e. First World Problems.
 

Tenebrion

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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So earlier I posted my first prototype of my automated breeding setup (using overflow mechanics and obsidianpipes). I've now tried alot of different setups and I just can't figure out a way to have a "closed system", meaning not having overflowing drones flying through the air, without having the risk that the princesses sometimes not going in to the hives properly. Do anyone have any working way of making such a system without the use of insertionpipes?
 

Tenebrion

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Oh! I feel so stupid I just got the exact same setup but reversed whereas the regular pipes puts the princess/drone in the apiary instead of the apiaristpipe. Thanks a bunch!
 

Spikednate12

Active Member
Nov 14, 2012
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I must admit that my current progress with bees is that I've found some bees, aviaries, and frames in various dungeons and villages, but haven't had the time to actually do anything with them yet. That's one of the 'problems'* I'm having with using a modpack: there's so much content to explore! But I'm sure this thread will be handy once I get started.

*i.e. First World Problems.
Can never have enough frames until you get an alveary.
 

stormkitster

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Jul 29, 2019
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Right can someone literally make me a get started guide on the whole bees deal "Particular" just the forestry ones. I just can not grasp my head around it and understand it at all. Funny thing is all I want is silk wisp to upgrade my bags. Sure I'll say it I'm a bee noob but that is fine. I really could use all the help I can get so please no jerks or trolls, much appreciated if one you can help me out.
 

Rakankrad

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Right can someone literally make me a get started guide on the whole bees deal "Particular" just the forestry ones. I just can not grasp my head around it and understand it at all. Funny thing is all I want is silk wisp to upgrade my bags. Sure I'll say it I'm a bee noob but that is fine. I really could use all the help I can get so please no jerks or trolls, much appreciated if one you can help me out.
If the only thing you want is silk wisps, just go into a jungle and find some tropical bees. No breeding/Mutations required. Only gonna need to make frames so that you get items at some decent %age.

If you want more detailed things about breeding well, Natural Bees + Other Natural Bees (other breed) = Common. Common + Natural = Cultivated. After that, it gets a little more complicated cause they start branching out from there.
 

Zjarek_S

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Jul 29, 2019
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Silk wisp is from silky combs, produced only by 3 species of bees, where 2 of them are far in mutation graph (I'd even say that without EB these 2 are last bees you get). But the 3rd species is one of the basic species, jungle one. So you need to find tropical hive and break it with a scoop (a few of them would be helpful, to get good number of princesses and drones). You can find them in jungles. They are really hard to find, because you are trying to spot a hive in jungle wood color on jungle tree. Then you need some place for them to live, so you need to make an apiary (one for each princess) and one princess and one drone in each of them. If you have too little drones, don't worry, from each generation of jungle bees you will get 2 drones.

Apiaries are very slow without frames in them, so it is highly advisable too fill all tree slots of every apiary with them. There are 3 types of frames, they give equal speed boost to bees, but they differ in durability. Unimpregneted one is worst and is used rather quickly, impregnated last longer, but the best one is proven frame. Unfortunately, Steve doesn't have skills to produce them, even with advanced machinery at his disposal. The only way to get proven frames is from apiarist villagers, either from trading, or rarely from their apiaries.

Every bee specie need a flower. For some bees, like for example meadow, the flower are flowers and roses, but for the other bees it may differ. Tropical bee needs "jungle" flower, which is for example vine. To get information about which flower a bee need and many other, use beealyzer. You need a honey drop for it to work.

Bees are quite picky where and when they will work. Each biome is characterized by humidity and temperature. When you place an apiary in the world, you will get information about biome you are currently in. There are 6 possible values for temperature: icy, cold, normal, warm, hot and hellish and 3 values for humidity: arid, normal and wet. Beealyzer will tell you what values are good for a bee and what tolerances it has. Bees, unless they have correct trait, won't work in night, without access to sky or when it is raining.

Some bees have special effects, often not so good. For example this tropical bee will poison you, if you are near to them while they are working. You can avoid it by wearing full set of apiarist armor.

Tropical bees give you quick access to propolis, so you can try to automate it early. It will save your time with replacing bees in apiaries and if you don't have to come near them, you won't get poisoned.

TROLOLOLO
 

MektonZero

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Bees? Egads, do I have bees. I'll pass along some of my tips on improving bees; with an example.

First, my usual setup. Four apiaries in a row, all containing pure versions of the starting bee; I normally keep four hives for each bee species unless I'm trying to collect a specific resource (like silk). For my purposes, a pure bee has the same trait on both sides for every category.

You set this up by putting a starting pair in the first apiary, to the left or right (just keep doing it the same way, I go from left to right) and whatever princesses you have in the other three (usually meadows or forest). Keep breeding the first princess/drone combo and the others with nothing but drones from that first hive. After a few generations, check the princesses in those other hives with a beealyzer. When a princess matches the first one exactly, put it in the 2nd hive and a drone from the first; after that those bees are clones of the first and will always remain so. I put a sign on the rightmost hive of a group of clones (with Lifespan, Speed and Drones) so I don't have to check to see what any bee behind or to the left of that sign is.

Repeat with drones from hives 1 and 2 until you get a third, move the sign, put one of the drones from 1 or 2 in with the third in apiary 3 and you now have 3 sets of clones, the fourth quickly follows. After I get four I can start breeding/improving them. I always breed the last 3 and keep the first pure in case things go badly wrong, in which case I can just repeat this section and reset all four bees to where I started.

As an example, I'll just focus on one trait; lifespan. Let's say I have a Noble/Short and a Valiant/Long and I want to breed Noble/Long. For this example, all the other traits are identical and they have x2 drones. When you first cross them, the princess picks one of the two traits from her traits, since both are Short, you end up with Short, one of the two traits for the drone is always Long. The same with species, the Princess side always picks Noble, the Drone side always picks Valiant.

So the 3 princess and all 6 drones will have Long/Short for lifespan and Noble-Valiant for species (for breeding purposes Noble/Valiant and Valiant/Noble are identical). This is what happens every time you breed two pure bees together. For the first crossing, you know what every bee is, so there is no need to identify them and waste valuable honey. So you cross them, trust to luck and here is what you could get (traits picked at random).

3 Princesses (Best to Worst) Noble - Short/Long, Noble-Valiant - Short/Long, Valiant - Long/Long
Drones (Best to Worst): Discarding any Short/Short out of hand (as we have all the pure Noble - Short/Short we want in Hive #1) we end up with Noble - Long/Short, 2x Noble-Valiant - Long/Short, Valiant - Long/Long, 2 x Valiant - Long Short. I usually keep the extra drones from the first crossing to guard against bad luck, so in this case I'd also have 3 Drones Noble-Valiant - Long/Short if I got too many Valiant pure bred drones.

Our best bet so far is the Noble Long/Short Princess and Noble Long/Short Drone, but we also match up the 2nd and 3rd bests and mix them as well. Picking traits at random again we get:
Princesses: 2x Noble-Valiant Short/Long, Noble - Short/Short (not much better)
Drones: Noble - Long/Long, Noble - Long/Short, Noble-Valiant - Long/Long (getting better), ignoring pure Valiants and Short/Short.
Mixing again (random picks after crossing the best princess with the best drone, 2nd with 2nd, ect.)

Princesses: Noble - Long/Long, Noble - Long/Short, Noble-Valiant - Long/Short
Drones: 3 best are all Noble - Long/Short
At this point what we are looking for is a Noble - Long/Long Princess and Noble - Long/Long Drone. When we get those we can put them into Hive #1 and turn any bees we want into Noble/Long bees. With this many traits out of the six bees being Noble and Long, it should only take about 2-4 more generations to get the bees we need.

One of the keys to my success is more drones, they are like lottery tickets and the more you buy the better your chances are. Once you breed a x4 Species and make it pure, take the time to go back and make all your existing species x4. This will make creating new species and improving your lines a lot easier since you will have twice as many "tickets" in the genetic lottery you're playing trying to find the best drones for your princesses.

Keep in mind that you don't have to breed a pair if you don't want to, if you only get two good drones out of the bunch; just breed those two with your best princesses and hope for three good ones next time.
 

danny75

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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I promised myself i would steer clear of the damned bees, but 3 days later...here i am...hooked. anyway, i've got a pure line of imperial and industrious breeding away happily, creating plenty of jelly and pollen. So i decided to splash out on an alveary to develop the demonic line.

Ok, so I have a handful of sinister and fiendish drones, and some sinister princesses...but have a little problem. I have 2 sinister queens: both have T:Hellish/None and H:Arid/None. Unfortunately, the nether is only Hot (weird!), so i've made an alveary in the nether with a powered heater (placed on the bottom row). The temperature does not seem to change and when i place the queen inside the alveary, it says hostile environment due to the temperature.

Any ideas where i'm going wrong?
 

Ckuhner

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
11
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I'm really trying to get in to the bee aspect but for some reason my queens are not dying. I have flowers right next to the apiary and bees flying all over the biomes but the queens health NEVER changes. What am I missing?