Covered in bees.

[hanky21]

You better bee-leive he's a little, up in the air, about the whole bee situation, it's gathering all the buzz these days though. Gotta stay with the times ya know?

 

[Dylz101]

I have bee-come slightly worried about this thread. Why don't all of you bee lovers comb back to this beeuatiful thread.

 

[Hambeau]

Sounds like you've got an ape-iary on your back...

 

[asb3pe]

I can tell you exactly how to do bees according to Binnie (I've never touched the Gendustry mod, I only do my bees manually and using Binnie's mods (i.e. Genetics).

However, I don't visit this forum very often anymore because I don't play Minecraft very often anymore because I don't find the game to be as exciting as it used to be. After you've played 10 modpacks with mostly the same mods, after you've done a mod like Thaumcraft a bunch of times... it just doesn't seem as interesting. I wish I could go back in time to FTB Ultimate days when everything in the game was so new and awesome. sigh

Anyhow, I'll try to make this brief. When you do your mutations to make a new species, the key idea is that you want to be mutating as FEW genes as possible - basically, you want to cross breed two bees having identical traits EXCEPT for their species. So what I always do is make what I call my "Super Bee". I use Cultivated bees for my super bees, simply because you get them early, and because they already have the "Fastest Production" gene by default. So that's one gene you don't have to worry about adding to your Super Bees. Essentially, just find the best traits you can and apply them to your Super Bee princess and drone. Every time you find a better trait than one you had, put it onto your super bee. When you're ready to make a new species, take a Super Bee princess and put one species on it. Then apply the other species to your drone. Now breed the two together - since both princess and drone are identical except for species and all other genes match perfectly, there's nothing that can happen to mess up the entire operation. Use an Alveary with a few mutation blocks (I use Eye of Ender in them) and you can bang out new species after new species very quickly by hand. Just keep building your "library" of all the different species in Serum Vials until you've made all the useful bees.

Hope that helps! Bees is a long slow process indeed, but for me it is always a labor of love. I hate doing Thaumcraft all over again for the umpteenth time but I LOVE doing bees, it never gets old.

 

[malicious_bloke]

I use Cultivated bees for my super bees, simply because you get them early, and because they already have the "Fastest Production" gene by default

Not currently. They have "fast" which is good enough to get you started but you'll want to breed up one of the several species with fastest as a priority.

 

[asb3pe]

Not currently. They have "fast" which is good enough to get you started but you'll want to breed up one of the several species with fastest as a priority.

Thanks bloke, I guess you're right, my bad. My point is that you want to do the least amount of "hard work" as possible... If I recall, the Blizzy Bee had the "Fastest" production trait, but since it will be a while before you breed up to Blizzy, just go with "Fast" production for your Super Bees. It's not the highest production trait, but it's still a very good trait to have. But for breeding new species, production gene really doesn't matter - it only matters once you're ready to start mass-producing raw materials using your bees.

Another point to mention - for breeding you want the "Shortest" lifespan trait. But once you've made your bee that gives you the products you need (such as Energetic Bee for redstone dust), that's when you want to put longest lifespan on them. But when you're breeding species together trying to make an Energetic Bee, you want to use shortest lifespan. You sure don't want to be sitting there waiting many minutes for your "longest lifespan" bees to cross-breed. That would be rather dumb. So put the shortest lifespan gene you can onto your Super bees.

 

[GreenZombie]

Thanks bloke, I guess you're right, my bad. My point is that you want to do the least amount of "hard work" as possible... If I recall, the Blizzy Bee had the "Fastest" production trait, but since it will be a while before you breed up to Blizzy, just go with "Fast" production for your Super Bees. It's not the highest production trait, but it's still a very good trait to have. But for breeding new species, production gene really doesn't matter - it only matters once you're ready to start mass-producing raw materials using your bees.

Another point to mention - for breeding you want the "Shortest" lifespan trait. But once you've made your bee that gives you the products you need (such as Energetic Bee for redstone dust), that's when you want to put longest lifespan on them. But when you're breeding species together trying to make an Energetic Bee, you want to use shortest lifespan. You sure don't want to be sitting there waiting many minutes for your "longest lifespan" bees to cross-breed. That would be rather dumb. So put the shortest lifespan gene you can onto your Super bees.

Using Gendustry I usually end up making a few templates as the game progresses. One template principally exists to ensure that Effect: None is in play as I can't be bothered to do the backwards thing of doing enough bees to make an Apiarists suit so I can start doing bees.

HOWEVER, if Magic Bees is in the modpack, fiddling with Fertility and Lifespan is pointless. Grab some ender eyes, find a stronghold and loot the library chests and you should come away with oblivion frames. These things, in a base forestry Apiary, will cause the queen to die on the next apiary tick - making the breeding process almost instant.

Then, I also have templates that switch between fertility 1 and fertility 4. Because Fertility 1x means I never have to figure out what to do with the drone excess, and fertility 4 lets me waste a whole 1 durability on an Oblivion frame to get 3 spare drones. Which is usually enough to breed one of my Hive princesses up to reflect the appropriate species to go into the advanced mutatron.

In a strange kind of way I hate Gendustry - it has both made Bee keeping tolerable, but also so lacking any breeding challenge whatsoever. My problem is that plain forestry is just, well, what the hell was SirSengir thinking. Bee breeding manually, using that stupid honey powered beealyzer, can hoover up days of your time to get relatively good tier 4 bee specimens.

---
One serious question however. Playing on a server. Need an Ender bee to proceed down a particular tree... The Ender Dragon was long ago killed and there are no hives to be found on the surface of the End. How to get? Do Ender bee hives spawn deep in End stone?

 

[asb3pe]

If I recall Chris, in Infinity modpack, there were two different types of Ender bees. One type spawned hives on the surface, but the other type only spawned hives below the surface. And it was this second type that was the important one, if I do recall properly. So yeah, I'd suggest using a flight suit or a flying ring and circle around and under the End to see if those are the End hives/bees you need.

And I've never used Magic Bees frames, I've always used 100% Binnie's stuff. But yeah it's slower and probably a bit more aggravating to do so. Bees is just one of the few things in the game where I feel like I know what I'm doing, and if I put the hard work, time and effort into it, the reward for all of that is very much worth it - just about any raw material, in limitless quantity. A Minecrafter's dream! Sometimes taking a shortcut can take all the fun out of something. I found that out when my server switched to a modpack with the new EE in it... after 3 days I had every item in the game at my fingertips... and I basically lost all my urge to play. I'm not a creative builder, I'm a game player!

 

[GreenZombie]

Personally I would not embark on any server running EE. I am annoyed enough that dw20 on the server I play includes ExU.
My desire to use genius try to rush 'bees' stemmed from the fact that AE2 and ic2 had consumed a lot of glow stone and the nether consequently is pillaged for literally a few km around spawn.

The ender bees I want so I can try breed up a draconian bee and the one with the resurrection effect so I can fight the end dragon again.