Bee-Breeding

[Jaih Pittman]

So I am kind of new to Bee-Breeding. I currently have two Industrious bees, a princess and a drone. Can I breed them together to get more Industrious bees? Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!

 

[MigukNamja]

Yes. Stick them in an Apiary. On the Apiary, pick either of the following systems:

=== BC and Apiarist Pipe Method ===
1. Wooden pipe on the bottom side
2. Redstone engine beneath the wooden pipe
3. Lever or redstone torch beneath that and flip the lever on. The redstone engine should start moving
4. Returning back to the wooden pipe, place a cobblestone or golden pipe behind (on the same Y level) as the wooden pipe
5. On top of the pipe you just placed and also feed into the Apiary, place a diamond or apiarist pipe
6. Set one side of the pipe for the drone and princess (if diamond) or bees (if apiarist) and another side for the pollen and combs
7. Place a chest the side that will receive the pollen and combs

=== TE3 Itemduct Method ===
1. Similar to above, but use 3 pieces of itemduct
2. Put a servo on the itemduct pulling from the apiary. I'd pull from the side of the apiary. Configure that side to pull from the apiary
3. Put an inventory against that same itemduct piece to take advantage of the servo already placed there
4. Configure the side of the itemduct to whitelist filter the pollen and combs. Alternatively, you can blacklist the drone and princess
5. Put 2 more pieces of itemduct to feed the princess and drone back into the apiary

In either of the above two setups, you will eventually get to the point where the alveary contains 63 drones. Then, depending upon the filtering, you may or may not get overflow drones in your inventory (chest).

To progress further, you will also need to breed an Imperial Princess and Drone and do something similar, though Imperials output royal jelly and a different kind of comb.

Once you have enough royal jelly, pollen, and honey, you can make Alvearies, which will increase your bee production by 10x, not including frames. A framed-up Alveary is a sight to behold.

 

[Bibble]

To the literal question you asked, the answer is no, but for interesting reasons, please bear with me.

The properties of a bee are divided into "traits". These include aspects such as the temperature tolerance, the working speed and the lifespan, among other things. The species of a bee is one of these. Traits are then divided into active and inactive. The active side is the part that controls how that particular bee behaves, the inactive side doesn't directly affect that bee, but can be passed down to future generations. You can see the difference between these when analysing a bee in the beealyser. The active trait is the one on the left, and the inactive on the right.

The interesting part is that the species is a discrete quantity, not a continuous one. It can mutate into different ones (i.e. as you've likely seen, meadows, forest, common, diligent, unweary and industrious), each of which are separate, even if there are links between them, in the form of mutation. The core point is that you can make a bee "pure" by making both the active and inactive traits the same, but, for species, you cannot make it "more" industrious.