Bee production facility

[netmc]

I've been doing some serious bee breeding over the last few days. I've tried not to look at any spoilers (It's hard.) For the first time ever, I have bred imperial bees, and working on the last of the diligent line. I've been purifying the lines to 4 offspring, fast worker, +/- 2 tolerances, and all the extras: cave, nocturnal, and flyer. (And to flowers)

I would like to keep a queen/drones of every bee I discover for future breeding purposes. It would be a never ending battle to keep apiaries stocked with frames if I used them for every bee. So, should I keep my non-production bees in a chest and occasionally breed the drones as needed, place them in apiaries (without frames) to keep the drone supply up and the occasional product, or work on building alviaries for them all? The alviaries are quite large, so I would need lots and lots of space. Since I've bred in the cave trait, I can house the bees inside a tower if needed. I would like to have all the drones readily available for breeding without running all over the place to get them.

I know how to automate the production facilities with both buildcraft and RedPower, so is one better than the other for mass production?

I have 10 automated apiaries right now with 6 others I use for breeding. Does anyone have suggestions for a production setup, or pictures of what they have done?

 

[eable2]

I have not gotten to the point of serious bee automation right now (I don't plan as much as you do!), but my inclination is to use redpower, redpower, redpower. It's a little uglier, but what you probably could do with apiaries is craft a sorting machine for each one, and plug that into the top (princess input) and bottom (drone input) and paint accordingly. Then, you could connect the product/drone output to that sorting machine along with storage, and you shouldn't have any issues with overflow: if there is no room for another drone (i.e. there are 64 drones in the bottom slot), it shouldn't send it. You can probably do something similar with alviaries. Buildcraft pipes are slow, dumb, and leaky...

Then again, if you're running low on resources, apiarists pipes are cheap and easy, and they work. Wooden pipe with energy pulser gate on the side, to apiarist pipe on the top. All bees go down, then use the interface to specify the type of bee in the apiary to give it priority. Then send drones (lower priority) and items in other directions to analyzers, gene pools, centrifuges etc.

In terms of frames, you should be fine without. The whole purpose of a frame is to increase production, so you really only need them for bees that you want to get lots of products from. If you think about it, there probably aren't very many of those in the long run. You will soon have stacks and stacks of pollen, royal jelly, propolis, beeswax, honeydew, etc. along with a large iron tank of honey. And if you really start finding yourself wanting more of one of those products, guess what? Make another apiary, get that bee's species serum, and inject it into another pair. At this point, I only use frames for bees that I am really trying to maximize output from. I used them on tropicals early on, to get tons of silk wisps for the apiarist suit and the woven backpacks. In the long run, I plan to use them exclusively in alviaries in frame housings, for bees that produce ores and other sought-after materials. But then again, my philosophy about automation is to never rely on something that you can't infinitely produce automatically. So eventually, I think I'll stick with the fast worker trait and lazily forget about frames ever again.

Not sure though...haven't really got into large bee infrastructure yet...I have a similar setup to you still, although I've discovered a few more species.
Why don't you try rock pollination, instead of flowers? As far as I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong), rock pollination = no flower requirement whatsoever.
Also: Be careful with the 4 offspring. It makes mutation and species discovery a lot easier, but in the long run, you will probably want 1 offspring for automation. Then you don't have to deal with the drones. Grab one of those serums from a rocky bee for future use. Liquid DNA will just plain not be an issue in the future - I already have a minimum size iron tank full if it. I would remove that from your pure-bred bees as soon as you finish with a branch.

Of course, this is all hypothetical. I now leave the floor to people who ACTUALLY have large working bee systems!

 

[Futalis]

Buildcraft pipes and apiarist pipes are extremely efficient and easy for alveary/squeezer/centrifuge automation. I highly recommend you process everything in buildcraft, then dump the results into a chest/ender chest that is connected to an RP sorting system.

Bee's are not very friendly with RP (RP considers all bees of every species the same item...so it doesn't differentiate between them...)

 

[eable2]

I'm really interested in this now (I'm at the stage where I should be thinking about this too), but I really really really want to use redpower instead of buildcraft, like, cultishly. It MUST be better with redpower!

Bee's are not very friendly with RP (RP considers all bees of every species the same item...so it doesn't differentiate between them...)

I've been playing around with this in creative...you can get around this problem with apiaries by simply leaving the track to the top slot for the princess unspecified in the sorting machine, so that's not hard. For alvearies, I haven't found a good way of getting the bees out with redpower unfortunately, but the sorting machine still works well for outputting the princesses and drones back into them.

Has anybody successfully set up a redpower system for their bees?

 

[Futalis]

I tried to set it up. I copies/improvised a set up from a video in which the guy set up automated alvearies using sorting machines and a regulator to make sure that a queen and then a drone goes in (they have to be set in this order otherwise you'll get your bees in places they don't belong). The problem I had with this is that the sorting machine can't tell the different between lets say diamond bees and ruby bees, so they have to be in two completely different systems of RP so they can't mix.

This problem gets more pronounced as you increase the number of alvearies in production and becomes much more laggy and tedious due to the massive number of relays/sorting machines/filters/transposers you need.

Don't get me wrong, you can do it, it's just very cumbersome and unintuitive. After I switched to BC pipes for the bee automation and the comb processing I can say I'm not going back.

Also, I highly recommend avoiding using relays in any set up. They murder FPS in the chunks in which they exist.

 

[Chesham]

I'm using a combination of buildcraft/redpower atm for my alvearies atm. I will probably engineer my bees to only give 1 drone once I have a bunch of dna made, that makes it really easy to automate. I'm sure you could do it with only redpower, but it's a lot easier to sort with the apiarists pipe and regular buildcraft pipes.

 

[Futalis]

Hmm I suppose making them less fertile is one way of dealing with that. Personally I like having passive DNA production. I have about 20 alvearies running now with various kinds of bees depending on what resources we need. Extra drones get identified and liquified into a 9x8x9 iron tank.

 

[Bibble]

My route was to move underground with my stable bees. All inoculated to the standard extreme fertility, fast worker, extreme resistance, nocturnal, flyer, cave dwelling and rock pollinating. Most I put in a line of apiaries to breed me a stack of drones (I like the current setup, as the stack is in the drone slot, and I can funnel the excess into the genepool). I have serums for most things, at this point, and have a few alvearies (for refined, industrious and imperial), with more being produced.

I've got 4 topside apiaries for cross-breeding (I get 4 princesses/drones of the required species by inoculation and work from there). Standard processing of materials via buildcraft, with all overflow voided (it's running continuously, and I don't really want to have a load of stuff dropping).

 

[b0bst3r]

I've got 24 apiaries and 4 alvearys running atm with mostly imperials and industrious, with about 8 of those 24 used for cross breeding..

Everyone that knows me knows I love RP and have a disgust for BC pipes, but, when it comes to bees, BC pipes win...... or more specifically the apiarist pipe wins.

The problem starts when you start inoculating bees with traits and that throws the RP sorting machine a curve ball...... You need so many duplicates of bees in the sorting machine that I gave up and switched to using a combination of Wooden pipes > Apiarist pipes > relays and then RP the rest of the way.

The downside to doing this is each Alveary needs 3 relays and if you believe the rumor mongerers amongst the FTBers you'll probably have read somewhere in these forums that some blame Relays for causing excessive lag, personally I don't have any problems with them.

 

[vineet]

I've got 24 apiaries and 4 alvearys running atm with mostly imperials and industrious, with about 8 of those 24 used for cross breeding..

Everyone that knows me knows I love RP and have a disgust for BC pipes, but, when it comes to bees, BC pipes win...... or more specifically the apiarist pipe wins.

The problem starts when you start inoculating bees with traits and that throws the RP sorting machine a curve ball...... You need so many duplicates of bees in the sorting machine that I gave up and switched to using a combination of Wooden pipes > Apiarist pipes > relays and then RP the rest of the way.

The downside to doing this is each Alveary needs 3 relays and if you believe the rumor mongerers amongst the FTBers you'll probably have read somewhere in these forums that some blame Relays for causing excessive lag, personally I don't have any problems with them.

Man, wow 4 alvearies, must of took a while
All bees have the same id's since when I use NEI, the bees all have 13268, so I think rp machines will think all the bees are the same which is a pity .
What is wrong with bc pipes, they are pretty good.

 

[b0bst3r]

Don't get me started with BC pipes, lets just say I'm sick of picking items up off the ground when they have valid destinations to go to, seems like they go "ahahhaaa it's bob lets throw these things outta the pipes".......

Alveary's do take a while to make but once you have the imperial/industrious lines sorted they are relatively easy.

 

[Matok]

I ended up going the BC pipe direction with the Alvearies. It's just hard to beat the apiarist's pipe. My current setup isn't 100% leak proof though. I have the wooden pipe with the gate pulling everything out of the hive, and then the apiarist's pipe sends all bees back into the Alveary and all other items to my sorting/processing system. The nice thing about this is the BC pipes are smart enough to insert the princess and the drones where they should go even though I have the pipes all hidden under ground, so it keeps everything above ground looking nice and neat. However, once I have a stack of drones in the hive, the extra just kinda fly out onto the ground. I had an idea where I was going to put a 'buffer' box in to hold drones, and then use gates to pull drones from the box when it is detected that the hive is 'missing drone', which it should be able too, but for some reason the Alvearies do not work with that gate setting. They work with the 'missing princess' setting though, so I'm sure it's just a bug.

I understand the hate that BC pipes get because they're random and have a tendency to eject items all over the place, but once you get into gates they actually work very well for some applications. If the 'missing drone' gate option actually worked with the Alvearies I'm sure I could make a leak proof BC pipe system that would keep a buffer of drones for my hives and liquefy all extra automatically, all while being hidden underground out of view. It's all a matter of using the right tool for the right job.

 

[Chesham]

Missing drone works with alvearies, are you sure you have it set up properly? That's what I use to get my drones back into my alvearies.

 

[netmc]

This is my bee line right now. I just have it sitting outside. It is all managed with RP2 sorters directly to 3 lengths of pipe on top and bottom. I have the pipes on top and bottom painted, the products are painted a different color which isn't used. and the pipes all connect together in the back, then run up to the barrels. Drones and combs without barrels go to the chest which is barely visible on the right.

Spoiler

It's rather ugly at the moment, but it works. I really want to clean it up and fully automate it. I don't have any DNA production facilities yet, so I've just been recycling the extra drones. (I have 6 or 7 stacks of scrap from it.) I have have horrible energy production right now, and couldn't even come close to powering any of the extra bee machines, so I have been breeding all the bees by hand. The rocky bees were the hardest so far, but I've found a few good tricks when breeding them. I do have to use the acclimatiser from time to time when I lose my tolerances while breeding the princess and she refuses to work in a meadows biome.

 

[Matok]

Missing drone works with alvearies, are you sure you have it set up properly? That's what I use to get my drones back into my alvearies.

Yeah I'm sure I have it setup properly, because the same setup works for the princess, but not the drones. I can take a wooden pipe with an Autarchic Gate connected to a wooden chest, set the gate to 'Missing Princess - Energy Pulse' and put a princess in the box, it will take it, but if I set it to 'Missing Drone - Energy Pulse' and put drones in the box, nothing happens. The GUI indicates that the Alveary doesn't think there are drones missing because the red line never lights up.

Multi-player if that makes any difference, but it shouldn't. I even tried a quick creative world and had the same issue, gate doesn't think drones are missing.

 

[netmc]

Since the missing drone gate isn't working, you could always chain the drone pulse off the missing princess. trigger the drone chest just long enough to pump out 1 drone.

 

[Chesham]

Do you have a princess in the alveary? Missing drone only lights up if there is a princess but no drone inside the alveary. That's the only other reason I can think of for it not working for you. If that doesn't work I wouldn't mind seeing a picture or 2 of your setup, I've been working at automating alvearies the last couple days so I know a little bit about how they work now..

 

[DoctorOr]

Man, wow 4 alvearies, must of took a while

Yep, takes forever!



Actually, it's just a function of time once you have industrial and imperial. If you have them automated (as well as one of the 100 bees that make wax), you _will_ get enough supplies for Alvearies. You can't avoid it.

 

[Matok]

Do you have a princess in the alveary? Missing drone only lights up if there is a princess but no drone inside the alveary. That's the only other reason I can think of for it not working for you. If that doesn't work I wouldn't mind seeing a picture or 2 of your setup, I've been working at automating alvearies the last couple days so I know a little bit about how they work now..

So! Apparently I never did test the Missing Drone setting while a princess was in the hive, must have always been an empty hive or a queen because I never have gotten it to work until you pointed out it has to have a princess. I guess I thought Missing Drone meant 'hive doesn't have any drones in it' not 'princess needs a drone'. Thanks for pointing that one out for me, I think I can improve my setup quite a bit now.

 

[Chesham]

Glad it's working! It kinda seems a bit weird at first, but it's actually really handy to have it only light up when you actually need the drone, not just when there's room.