Bee question to the experts

[baw179]

OK. Trying to get my head round these stupid bees again. I'm trying to get some pure industrial bees for tree pollination. Last time I tried I got as far as cultivated, but then it all went wrong and I wound up back with tropicals!! I read from someone that it's best to get fertility 4 on them very early as you have more chances to "level up" so I've got some fresh forest bees and some fresh winter bees and bred those together. I've now got 1 forest winter hybrid princess with 3x on the active and 4x on the inactive and a matching drone, then the other 2 drones didn't go too well as they are forest common hybrids with 2x and 3x active/inactive.

What's the best thing to do with the forest winter hybrids now? Should I put the princess in with the hybrid drone or should I put her in with a pure winter drone and hope I get 4x fertility? I have impregnated, choc and magic frames available but I'm breeding them without at the moment so hopefully I don't mess them up this time.

Thanks.

 

[Exedra]

Whizz may be able to help you here.

 

[Kealrath]

Hi,

when you play with the ExtraBee ModPack, than dont worry about the fertility. Breed your way up to the Imperial Bee's, because you can extract all traits into serums.

http://plornt.com/bees/

This site should help.

A hint, put your chocolate frames in the apiary, and then wait for the bee cycle/ticks, and change before the last tick, your frames with the soul frames. So, you dont have to wait for mutations!

Greeting,
Kealrath

 

[tehBlobLord]

Don't try and crossbreed TRAITS manually unless you're very good at bees, because you don't have any control over which trait is transferred and you're more likely to ruin your bee.
Use the beealyser to verify that your bee is pure (and try to have a good supply of them) before you move on to the next stage.
Another tip is to use the rarer bee's drone in the breeding; for example, when combining Common and Forest, use a Forest princess and a Common drone because you can easily make more common drones but losing a common princess would be annoying.

If you want 4x fertility (not very useful though) use the genetic machines rather than apiary to transfer the trait.

 

[Bomb Bloke]

To start out with, you don't have advanced genetic machines, so trying to get maximum fertility on the bees you WANT it on isn't easy. You're better of doing without it until your advanced machines are built, at which point you can distribute that trait with ease.

The reason for this is that every time you successfully mutate a new species, the fertility of the resulting bees drops down to the default for that species. You can spend quite some time getting a decently fertile cultivated bee for eg, but then you'll find you're back to square one when you advance to unweary/diligent. So forget about trying to breed it in manually.

Skip industrious bees for now and aim for imperial instead. This'll grant the ability to make the serums which are key to advancing with bees while retaining your sanity. After that by all means go for industrious - they happen to be the next logical step in bee-keeping anyway.

Whenever you get a pure princess of a new species, breed it with pure drones of the same species over and over. You should eventually be able to produce drones that stack together, at which point you should throw away any other drones of that species that don't stack.

Keep going until you've got at least a dozen bees or so in your stack, then select some other princess of an uninteresting species and start breeding it with the stacked drones over and over. Eventually all its traits will match those of the drones, that is to say, you'll have two identical princesses. It's now safe to use one of those princesses to start working towards the next species.

 

[d1ng0d0g]

If you only have forestry bee breeding, your best tool is going to be the chocolate frame. Followed by some knowledge of Mendelian Genetics.

In my own experience, the best way to get traits on a Bee, is by breeding them into the type you want.

So if you want an industrious Bee with fertility 4. Get a pure industrious, and a pure wintry and start from there. And the rest is pure math.

Extra Bees is a really good mod in my opinion, but it does remove the immense fun you can have with manual bee breeding (if you are a bit OCD like I am, yes, that can be fun).

 

[ex13]

If you only have forestry bee breeding, your best tool is going to be the chocolate frame.

Chocolate frames are from extra bees as well. So if you have access to chocolate frames, than you also have access to the advanced genetic machines.

@OP: If you don't have access to those machines, breeding traits (like 4x fertility) is possible and not hard - it just takes a lot of time usually. Chocolate frames help you cutting down the time. There are several good tutorials out there, on how to manually breed bees to get the right traits. Two really good tutorials are:
Sunny's Bee Guide - Section 3. Crossbreeding - Refining Traits
FTB Wiki Bee Cultivation - Section 6. Breeding for traits (see also Part 1: Bee basics)
I strongly advice to also read the previous sections of these tutorials, they are incredibly helpful.

In your current situation I would simply drop the princess and the matching drone in your apiary, and hope to get a drone with 4x fertility on both active and inactive. This can be used to get a princess with those fertilities as well (eventually). If no drone has both 4x fertility, you will probably have one with 3x active and 4x inactive again, so just repeat. So basically, just breed your princess with the best drone of your last batch, and eventually you will reach 4x fertility (there is a small chance of ending up with a 3x fertility princess and no good drones - but that chance is reaaaally small. In this case just take another wintry drone and start again).

 

[baw179]

Thanks guys. Seems very confusing with people having differing opinions on which route is best. I am playing DW20 and so have the extra bees stuff. I've been messing with bees for a long time but never seem to get any further than nobles and cultivateds. Every time I try to go to the next step my bees fail and I get some stupid hybrids from an old session, like commons or cultivated hybrids with tropicals or something. I don't know what I'm doing wrong but they just don't work for me. I try the chocolate frames to nearly kill them and then put in the souls for the last tick to improve chances of mutations but as I say, it always seems to mutate backwards instead of getting the next ones along. It's like diligents are completely broken - I haven't been able to get even a hybrid. I've had a few majestic, ancient and primeval drones but when I put them with the closest princess to try to get pures it never works and I'll something like a cultivated noble hybrid princess back . Of course I take the soul frames out before trying to purify them.

Someone said to get imperials but I don't want those, I want industrials for the pollination. According to the nessirogaming bee wiki the imperials don't change to industrials, instead you need diligents and unwearys which come from cultivateds, but I can't get any diligents at all, I keep getting stupid nobles and occasionally some majestics but then they all fail and I wind up with a common or tropical princess hybrid again.

I might have to look into this serum stuff and extra machines. I have quite a lot of bee products - 113 stacks of honey drops, 70 stacks of wax, 26 stacks of silk wisps, 20 stacks of honey dew, 6 stacks of propolis and about 200 buckets of seed oil from squeezing grass seeds. ..and all I've got to show for it are stupid nobles and cultivateds.

 

[Ako_the_Builder]

People have different ways of getting to bee endgame, you will need both imperial (royal jelly) and industrious (pollen) to do anything extensive with extra bees as you are going to want to move to alvearies, at least for breeding even if you don't use them for production (although you should use them fro production as they're faster and can have frames inserted automatically).

Here's my method:

forest + meadow = common (use soul frames keep going til pure common, get a stock of pure drones
forest or meadow + common = cultivated (same as above, get a stock of pure drones)

Any mundane princesses with a few pure drones will get you a more princesses of the same species as the drone after a few life cycles each - use this to get higher level princesses, starting with cultivated. Also run cultivated in a production setup for beeswax and honey (impregnated frames)

cultivated + common = diligent or noble (again, soul frames, try to get pure, build a drone stock, save any hybrids you get for further breeding

Now depending what the last step gets you head to industrious or imperial, getting a pure princess and a drone stock each time

diligent + cultivated = unweary
diligent + unweary = industrious

or

noble + cultivate = majestic
noble + majestic = imperial

Now you should have a pure breeding pair of common, cultivated, diligent, noble, unweary, majestic, industrious and imperial. Most of these bees are used as start points for some advanced species.

Production time, keep producing cultivated, add production setups of industrious and imperial to start getting stocks of pollen and royal jelly (honeydew can also be squeezed into honey btw)

Now make extra bees genetic machines, start pulling species and other traits from bees, produce dna to sort serums (charges/quality) with spare drones.

Make a breeding alveary, use a wiki to start breeding towards specific species.

At some point I chunkload a snowy biome and run wintery bees for a couple of cycles so I've got enough drones to get the max fertility serum, then make a max fertility/shortest lifespan cultivated pair just to produce drones for dna. My production bees all have min fertility and start out as rocky bees that I add traits to (rocky bees have excellent 2nd page stats - tolerances, nocturnal, cave dwelling, rain).

 

[netmc]

I breed my bees manually, although I do use the acclimitizer from time to time to rescue a bad mating where the resultant bee won't work in an environment I have available.

As soon as you are able, set up automated apiaries to continually produce drones. Create an apiary for each pure mating set you have available. You will need lots and lots of drones for breeding bees manually. The rest can be recycled or turned into liquid DNA for the extra bee machines. For automated apiary setups check this thread on page 3 and following. http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/beekeeping-guide-yay-or-nay.7173/page-3

First step is 4x fertility. I normally use a marble princess as the base mating pair along with a wintery drone. The only 2 traits that are important are the marble species and the 4x fertility. I use the marble princess as I don't have to be in a snow biome to mate them. The first generation is normally a 50/50 hybrid of the two. If you are lucky, you can breed the resultant bees in a normal biome, if not, you will need to use the acclimitizer, or find a snowy biome for the next mating. After the second mating, I look for any bees that have the 4x fertility. Preferably in more than one spot. Also look for the marble species train in as many spots as possible. I also try and get rid of the freezing effect, but not at the risk of 4x fertility or species. The rest of the traits don't matter at this point in time and can be ignored. These will be bred in by other bees later.

Keep breeding the bees together until you end up with a marble princess with 4x fertility in both spots. Once you have this, put the bees in an automated apiary to start producing drones. You will need lots and lots of drones for breeding the other bee lines.


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As far as your original question, keep any bees that have the forest trait and 4x fertility. nothing else matters. Breed the bees together. Having 2x/4x fertility on the drones is fine. It is the princess that determines the number of drones produced by the mating, so having the 3x/4x on the princess is awesome at this step.

It will probably take several generations to get 4x fertility and forest on both your drones and princess to finally have a stabilized genetic pattern. (where every mating results in identical offspring)

------------------------------------------

Back to the guide -

I keep one genetically pure pair of bees in the automated apiaries until I have a stack of 64 drones, or until I clone the genetic line into another princess and drone.

To clone a princess, you take a dozen or so drones, and rebreed the princess with those drones until the princess and the drones have the same genetic makeup. You discard any new drones produced along the way.

Once you have a clone (or multiple) of the princess and an identical breeding drone, the next step is to go for common and/or cultivated. Breed one of your 4x fertility princesses along with the highest fertility hive bee of another species. It's ok if it is 2x fertility. It doesn't matter at this point. If you are going to be around the apiary, put in chocolate frames to start, then swap them out with soul frames to encourage mutations. If you are doing other things, just put in the soul frames and check on them later.

If you end up with a common drone, just set it aside for the moment. What you are really wanting is a common species on the princess. Sometimes in this phase I will end up with cultivated-common princess. If you end up with cultivated, that's ok too. Once you have one of the cultivated or common species, it is a lot easier to get the other later. Once you get common on the princess, breed it together with the common drone. If you were breeding together forest and marble species to get your common, try breeding together a common-forest princess with a common-marble drone. This will give you a 50% chance for common, and only 25% chance for marble or forest. Since they are opposite hive bees that can mutate into common, use soul frames for the additional chance to get a mutation. (This will sometimes give you a cultivated bee as well, but that is ok.) Once you have a common or cultivated bee, start trying to purify the line to either common or cultivated. If you get to cultivated, try and keep the fast worker trait. Try to keep the 4x fertility along the way as well, but don't worry if you lose it. You can breed it back in once you have the species stabilized.

After stabilizing the species, clone the princess again. You now have the original line for producing more drones, and this guarantees that you never lose a bee line as you are trying to mutate them or bring in other traits to the line.

Now that you have your common (or cultivated) line, breed it back with your original 4x fertility line. Now you are going for the 4x fertility and the common species. The rest of the traits don't matter as common does not have any special traits that are worth keeping. I recommend chocolate frames or if you are on 1.5.1, use the new bee house in forestry. You can't use any frames, but you also have a 0% chance for mutations. perfect for breeding in traits and purifying the bee line.

Once you have a 4x common and a 4x hive bee, breed those together and go for a 4x cultivated line. Each time a bee mutates, the genetics will be the base for that bee, so you will have to breed in the 4x fertility again, but it you are lucky, you will end up with it on the half of the bee that didn't mutate, so it makes it much easier to breed back in.

How to breed in the bees with 1x fertility - Use a 4x princess and breed it in with a 1x drone. You will then have at least 1 generation to with 4x fertility. Keep all the drones from this breeding. Now since your princess will likely have a 1x fertility as well, repurify the princess so it has 4x fertility again. If you are going for rocky bees, use a cultivated princess (or a bee house) as the cultivated line does not mutate with the rocky. Now, breed your 4x fertility princess with one of the drones from the previous mating. Since those drones will have both 1x fertility and 4x fertility, you have at least a 75% chance to end up with 4x fertility in the new generation. Try to keep as many of the traits you are able, but go for 4x fertility and species first and foremost. Once you have stabilized the line with 4x fertility and as many of the traits as possible, clone this line again (see a pattern?), and breed the princess (with 4x fertility) with one of the original breeding drones from the very first mating. This time, you are looking for any traits that were lost the first time around. Try and keep 4x fertility and the new traits. Go for traits above fertility this time as you already have a stabilized line with 4x that you can breed back in if necessary.

Each time you try and breed in traits, pick one trait, and try and breed that in. Since you clone your line each and every time, you never lose your current progress. It does add in a few extra steps, but also prevents the total collapse as you experienced earlier when you ended up with tropical bees.

Each time I mutate a species, I go for any traits and species that are specific to that bee line that I don't already have elsewhere. Then I go for fertility. Once you have a stabilized line, you can bring over the traits you want into your other bees. The apiarist databank is a good source of information for this as it shows the base traits of the species.

 

[baw179]

Thanks to you both, that is really helpful. I've just discovered I've lost both my common and cultivated princesses somehow, probably frikkin Tropical hybrids again , so am going to have to start from scratch and follow your guides.

Regarding the winter ones, I'm already ahead of you there! . I've had those running in a spot loaded taiga for a while now and have around 3 stacks of pure drones. At least I'm doing something right!

 

[snooder]

1. Make sure you analyze every single bee you put into an apiary. It looks like you aren't, and that's why you keep getting fucked.
2. ONLY use pure bees to try for a mutation. If you get a Noble/Majestic drone for example, don't put it with a Cultivated/Noble to try and get another majestic. Only use a Cultivated/Cultivated Noble/Noble pair. This increases your chance of a successful mutation.
3. Run multiple breeding lines at once.
4. Once you have a species, keep at least one pure strain of it running constantly in an apiary. When you need a princess, breed a random hive princess with a few drones of that species.

 

[baw179]

Another question!! So I've been breeding a forest princess and winters again (just while I breed a bunch of pure drones in my other apiaries to get started properly). I had 4x 4x winter forest hybrid princess and I've now made it into a pure forest princess by breeding it with pure forest drones, but I've lost the 4x and it's now 3x 3x. Last session I got 4 drones, 3 with 3x 3x on and 1 with 4x 3x, so I put that 4x 3x one in with the princess to try to make a pure 4x 4x princess and used some soul frames (is that correct?). But it only gave me 3 drones this time and the princess is still 3x 3x. I have 2 3x 3x drones and 1 4x 3x drone so I can try again, but should I be using soul frames to try to get that drone's single 4x active trait onto the princess, or should I just let them breed naturally?

I never know if I should be using soul frames when trying to get a good trait off a same species drone onto the princess. Obviously I know to use them when trying to get a different species.

 

[Zjarek_S]

Another question!! So I've been breeding a forest princess and winters again (just while I breed a bunch of pure drones in my other apiaries to get started properly). I had 4x 4x winter forest hybrid princess and I've now made it into a pure forest princess by breeding it with pure forest drones, but I've lost the 4x and it's now 3x 3x. Last session I got 4 drones, 3 with 3x 3x on and 1 with 4x 3x, so I put that 4x 3x one in with the princess to try to make a pure 4x 4x princess and used some soul frames (is that correct?). But it only gave me 3 drones this time and the princess is still 3x 3x. I have 2 3x 3x drones and 1 4x 3x drone so I can try again, but should I be using soul frames to try to get that drone's single 4x active trait onto the princess, or should I just let them breed naturally?

I never know if I should be using soul frames when trying to get a good trait off a same species drone onto the princess. Obviously I know to use them when trying to get a different species.

Princess genome decide how many offsprings she will have (I don't think that drones have any effect on how the queen works, but I may be wrong). You should only use soul frames if you want to mutate a bee, it doesn't have any effect on transferring traits and even can have negative effect here by mutating the bees that you want to crossbreed. Chocolate frames are a lot better choice here, because they reduce bees' lifespan, so you can do those manipulations faster.

 

[baw179]

Princess genome decide how many offsprings she will have (I don't think that drones have any effect on how the queen works, but I may be wrong). You should only use soul frames if you want to mutate a bee, it doesn't have any effect on transferring traits and even can have negative effect here by mutating the bees that you want to crossbreed. Chocolate frames are a lot better choice here, because they reduce bees' lifespan, so you can do those manipulations faster.

Hmm. I don't understand this then. I had a winter forest hybrid princess with 4x 4x on it (not hard to do of course) and managed to make that into a pure forest princess but I lost the 4x 4x to 3x 3x. If the drones' traits don't affect the queen then why has it not stayed at 4x 4x ?

 

[snooder]

Another question!! So I've been breeding a forest princess and winters again (just while I breed a bunch of pure drones in my other apiaries to get started properly). I had 4x 4x winter forest hybrid princess and I've now made it into a pure forest princess by breeding it with pure forest drones, but I've lost the 4x and it's now 3x 3x. Last session I got 4 drones, 3 with 3x 3x on and 1 with 4x 3x, so I put that 4x 3x one in with the princess to try to make a pure 4x 4x princess and used some soul frames (is that correct?). But it only gave me 3 drones this time and the princess is still 3x 3x. I have 2 3x 3x drones and 1 4x 3x drone so I can try again, but should I be using soul frames to try to get that drone's single 4x active trait onto the princess, or should I just let them breed naturally?

I never know if I should be using soul frames when trying to get a good trait off a same species drone onto the princess. Obviously I know to use them when trying to get a different species.

1. Soul frames are JUST for mutating new species. Do not use them if you are trying to breed specific traits.
2. Your mistake was in breeding the winter/forest hybrid with forest/forest drones. At that stage you ought to have bred it with a 4x 4x winter/forest hybrid drone. See, the way the traits work (taking one from princess and one from drone) you had zero chance of getting a 4x 4x forest bee, and every mating with more purebred forests lowered the chance of that. On the other hand, mating the 4x 4x hybrids gives you about a 24% shot of getting that bee.

Get out a sheet of paper and do Punnet squares to calculate the best odds of getting the trait you want.

 

[netmc]

Only breed together hybrids forest/winter and forest/winter. You will basically have a 50% chance of getting another forest/winter and 25% each of pure forest or pure winter.

The same with the fertility. If you have 2 bees with 4x/3x fertility, you have a 50% chance for another bee with 3x/4x fertility, and 25% each for 3x/3x and 4x/4x. Each trait is handled independently of every other trait.

If you have a purebred trait (active and inactive the same), when you breed it with another bee that has a purebred trait, you will end up with a bee that is a pure hybrid. one trait from the first parent, one trait from the second parent. If you breed together those hybrid offspring, you end up with the chances listed above. (It's actually 25% of 4x/3x, 25% of 3x/4x, 25% 4x/4x and 25% 3x/3x, but since the two 3x/4x combinations are the same for breeding purposes, I combined the percentages.)

When you cross breed for traits, don't breed together the bees unless the trait you want to keep is both in the princess and in the drone. It's possible (if you get really lucky) to take a single trait from a drone and incorporate into the genome, but very unlikely. If you wait to breed pairs until you have the trait once in the princess and once in the drone, you have a lot higher chance of keeping the trait.

 

[egor66]

sry if this has been stated above I read OP only, first off get 4 or so apiaries combine any hive bees to get common best to have 3-5 princesses to work with, now cross a common princess with any hive bee get you self some cultivated princesses, here you should inbreed the same species until you have pure species so at least 2 princess of each, now take a common princess & a cultivated drone cross breed & keep rebreeding until you get diligent, keep Iding these new hybrids untill you have at least one pure princess then put that in its own hive & inbreed with best trait diligent drones you got, by this time you should have gotten a second diligent princess, this you cross with a cultivated drone & again keep rebreeding until you get unweary princess & some drones, when you have got this new species stable "pure" you are just a step from the end, cross an unweary princess with a diligent drone & do the same again rebreed untill you get industrious pure princess & drones, now you have the bee you need one thing left to do is to clone them, the easy way with out eb machines is to to have a full stack of the required species & any hive princess that can take the biome you in, put the stack of pure drones in the bottom & rebreed the princess untill its pure. this way is the slowerest way more like vanilla if you like but easy for the novice to get to grips & learn how it all works.

ps I forgot use frames if you can 3 chocolate frames in the apiary until the bee is almost dead then swap out for 3 soul frames, the chocolate frame decrease the life so make it faster to kill off & get the new species, the soul frames help a lot with mutation chance.

last note or edit, when starting with hive bees, use ones that can be used in a plains biome as this give you more basic options to chose from, okay thats about all I can say with out going into EB & dna etc, hope some of this helps you achieve your goal.

 

[baw179]

RIGHT! I'm beginning to lose the will to live with these stupid bees!!!

OK, I just got another pure winter princess and then found a forest winter hybrid drone with 4x and 3x on it. I've just bred those 2 with soul frames and I've got now a forest winter hybrid princess 4x 4x, yay! But, what I do now to make this a pure forest princess with 4x 4x ? I still have quite a collection of forest winter hybrid drones : I have 1 with 4x 4x, 4 with 4x 3x, and 5 with 3x 4x. Last time I tried this I lose the forest princess and it turned back into a winter princess so I need to know how to stop that from happening and to keep it as a forest princess.

 

[TangentialThreat]

Quick, Gregor Mendel demands a blood offering!

Bees are not controllable. Make a lot of 4x bees and then hybridize them with a lot of forest bees, picking the best result each time. Just one or even two princesses isn't really enough but if you are willing to devote three or more queens to this you will almost certainly get it.