Hello everyone! I have recently just started out toying with bees and would like some tips on how to go about using them. I have currently found the forest, meadows, wintry, marbled, valiant, and steadfast. I have made a common drone from breeding. Any tips appreciated!
Beginner tips for bees
- Thread starter toe2468
- Start date
Some basic tips that I can give are that you will want to get a pure princess and drone of each type. Make sure to get a bee analyzer to analyze the bees and to make sure that they are pure, and it will help with further breeding. Also, when you get a good pure-bred bee, you can take the drones from those bees (via some form of automated apiary) and breed them with any princess (preferably one that won't cause any mutations) to get, eventually, another pure bred princess of that type.
Take it slow. If you don't understand something, read up a bit on it. Bee keeping is both time consuming and relaxing, so if you feel like you need to rush, it isn't that good.
Also, try mixing a common bee with one of the hive bees. You may get something ... fast.
Basic tips
before the alveary: when you are trying to get pure bred of something, always use 3 soul frames for mutation and chocolate frames for non-mutation breeding.
after you get alveary: for mutation, use 2 mutator blocks (2 uranium) + frame housings (with choco frames in them)
before the alveary: when you are trying to get pure bred of something, always use 3 soul frames for mutation and chocolate frames for non-mutation breeding.
after you get alveary: for mutation, use 2 mutator blocks (2 uranium) + frame housings (with choco frames in them)
You will need quite a bit of honey in order to analyze all the bees you get. If you have already managed to get a pure common princess and a pure common drone, I would suggest you put those in a separate apiary with some chocolate frames and keep breeding them. They are a decent source of honey combs early on before you get much better bees. And since manual breeding can get a bit tedious after a while, you might want to set up some automation. To do that you will need the apiarist's pipe which you can craft with diamond pipes and propolis. Tropical bees (found in jungles) are a good source of propolis early on. If you find that the honey you get by doing this is still not enough, breed more common princesses and set those up to auto-breed also so you can get more honey.
Assuming you are still early in the game, and don't have huge amounts of energy to waste on some really power-hungry machines, another thing you could do to make your production more efficient is breed your bees with rocky bees (found underground) as they have some really good traits that can really help (nocturnal, flyer and cave dwelling if i remember correctly). What you want to do is try to pass on these good traits to your other bees, but at the same time make sure you don't let their species change to rocky. This involves quite a bit of luck, but it is definitely manageable if you don't mind some grind. At least this is what I did, although to be fair I did play other games in the past which had mechanics similar to this, so I knew what I was doing.
Assuming you are still early in the game, and don't have huge amounts of energy to waste on some really power-hungry machines, another thing you could do to make your production more efficient is breed your bees with rocky bees (found underground) as they have some really good traits that can really help (nocturnal, flyer and cave dwelling if i remember correctly). What you want to do is try to pass on these good traits to your other bees, but at the same time make sure you don't let their species change to rocky. This involves quite a bit of luck, but it is definitely manageable if you don't mind some grind. At least this is what I did, although to be fair I did play other games in the past which had mechanics similar to this, so I knew what I was doing.
If you have a diligent-anything drone, go with that. If not, the next best option would be a common-forest/meadows hybrid but make sure to use soul frames to increase the chances that the common trait of the princess and the forest/meadows trait of the drone will mutate. If you don't have that either, then just go with a pure forest/meadows drone and again use soul frames.
Routers work superbly with apiaries. Very long rows of apiaries can be emptied and filled with 3 routers, a couple diamond pipes, an emerald or wooden pipe and an autarchic gate or redstone engine. You'll be swimming in bees.
I haven't messed with routers yet, so I could be wrong about this, but based on what I know about them, you can't really specify which apiary they output each drone to, right? What I mean is, if for example you have a router handling two apiaries, one with imperial bees and the other with industrious, if both queens happen to die at the same time, then there's a chance the router might end up breeding the imperial princess with the industrious drone, and the industrious princess with the imperial drone. Unless that's what the diamond pipes are for? If so, can you expand on how this would work?
Nice! Noble bees are an even better source of honey than common bees, and you can get propolis from diligent bees, so you might not need those tropical bees anymore!
If you have both Valiant and Steadfast bees(likely a drone of one and a princess of another), you are almost ready to breed a hero. Well, it likely will take a few generations, and maybe some more bees then what you currently have, but you may just get yourself a strain of bee which will hurt things near your apiary but produce cocoa combs. I think they only hurt hostile mobs, but I am likely mistaken. If not for the need for Marbled Bees to mix with heroes(quite a bit, actually, as most of the marbled line requires the heroic line to progress), they would pretty much be useless.(unless you have Thaumic Bees, in which case you should breed true heroes with the spawn of The Nether, which starts you on a very interesting chain of mutations and ultimately can result in bees producing Jelly Babies for you now and then)
1) Breed in Maximum fertility. If you already have the extra bees machine, you can just use a serum. But the point is to have that 4x drones when you attempt to mutate.
The reason is simple, the chance to mutate is _per_bee_.
2) Nocturnal is the absolute best trait for speeding up everything
3) The second best, unless you're in a no-rain biome, is flyer. However, there is _absolutely_no_ base forestry bee with the flyer trait and you have to look to one of the expansions to get that trait.
4) The tropical/exotic/edenic line is the only base forestry bees to produce combs that create honey 100% of the time. Imperial bees outproduce only if you're willing to squeeze honeydew.
5) Save honeydew, it has a lot of great uses.
6) Setup a cloning system to turn all of your excess bees into exact copies of each other. When you're done mutating a breed, and have all the serums you want, throw that princess back in the cloning vats. When you want to mutate a new breed, take a princess and drone that have been fully cloned and apply the breed serum for the two breeds needed for the mutation
7) Until late in the Thaumic bee lines, the best effect for these cloned bees is Explorer. Free xp for no risk and no server load. If you've got 6-8 bees running at the same time, the xp is very fast. (There was a bug that still gave xp even after the queen died off, that's fixed, but simple automation can keep the same effect)
8) The acclimatiser can get you BOTH_5 tolerances for both humidity and temperature. These tolerances are passed on to offspring and can be captured in a serum. Use water and lava to get UP_1 in both categories, then when you switch to sand and ice they will convert to BOTH_1 and stay at both all the way to 5. (Note, anything more than BOTH_3 for humidity is wasted)
9) Alvearies Alvearies Alvearies. That's where your honey should be going. Even with three frames, apiaries are slower. Without those three frames, the apiary isn't worth the effort. Since frames cannot be automated (which is intentional, and not a bug, and will not be changed) it's a lot of manual effort. Your first alveary is an imperial, your second an industrious. Your third a Cultivated. Why the Cultivated? Because the first two don't make beewax.
The reason is simple, the chance to mutate is _per_bee_.
2) Nocturnal is the absolute best trait for speeding up everything
3) The second best, unless you're in a no-rain biome, is flyer. However, there is _absolutely_no_ base forestry bee with the flyer trait and you have to look to one of the expansions to get that trait.
4) The tropical/exotic/edenic line is the only base forestry bees to produce combs that create honey 100% of the time. Imperial bees outproduce only if you're willing to squeeze honeydew.
5) Save honeydew, it has a lot of great uses.
6) Setup a cloning system to turn all of your excess bees into exact copies of each other. When you're done mutating a breed, and have all the serums you want, throw that princess back in the cloning vats. When you want to mutate a new breed, take a princess and drone that have been fully cloned and apply the breed serum for the two breeds needed for the mutation
7) Until late in the Thaumic bee lines, the best effect for these cloned bees is Explorer. Free xp for no risk and no server load. If you've got 6-8 bees running at the same time, the xp is very fast. (There was a bug that still gave xp even after the queen died off, that's fixed, but simple automation can keep the same effect)
8) The acclimatiser can get you BOTH_5 tolerances for both humidity and temperature. These tolerances are passed on to offspring and can be captured in a serum. Use water and lava to get UP_1 in both categories, then when you switch to sand and ice they will convert to BOTH_1 and stay at both all the way to 5. (Note, anything more than BOTH_3 for humidity is wasted)
9) Alvearies Alvearies Alvearies. That's where your honey should be going. Even with three frames, apiaries are slower. Without those three frames, the apiary isn't worth the effort. Since frames cannot be automated (which is intentional, and not a bug, and will not be changed) it's a lot of manual effort. Your first alveary is an imperial, your second an industrious. Your third a Cultivated. Why the Cultivated? Because the first two don't make beewax.
Another tip: injecting rocky bee with bee species serum and other good serums with a goal to duplicate a power bee is slower than just breeding the hive princess with multiple pure bred drones (with 3 choco frames) and also, with 4 offsprings, rebreed the best drone with the princess, and the rest can be put into the inoculator for chance of extracting mutated bee serum.
Personally I recommend starting with Jungle bees, they're annoying because they can poison you but the silky combs they produce are very handy. You can get silk wisps to create a beekeeping suit (which will protect you from any nasty effects bees might have, like the poison from jungle bees) and the silky propolis can also produce regular propolis which you can use for Apiarist's pipes (which allow you to setup some rudimentary automation so you won't have to sit next to your hives just to get more combs). I think you can also get honey and wax from the silky combs, but you can get that from most other mundane combs as well.
Yes that is correct. They get all mixed up and make bees sort of randomly. (Though sometimes they get sort of locked in a pattern and stabilize.) I check on them every now and then and pull out the ones I want for more specific breeding. The router system with a lot of apiaries is just for quick random breeding of bees to use as raw material for more precise methods. It also gives me tons of honey and wax(I don't always use soul frames in all of the apiaries), and other products to a lesser extent.
I would like to point out a good wiki made some times ago by someone from here:
http://mc.nessirojgaming.eu/bees/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://mc.nessirojgaming.eu/bees/index.php?title=Main_Page
Frames can be automated, you just need to use Routers from the Factorization Mod. You need to add a machine filter upgrade.
It does work, I watched this video and found out how to do it.
He's automating frames in an alveary not apiary. Read what I said.