Beginners Guide to Forestry
Forestry has basically 3 branches that you can go into without worrying about the others:
* Automatic Farms - for the automatic production of vanilla crops / modded crops.
* Bees - to get an infinite supply of certain end game materials.
* Trees - to get an variety of decorative wood textures.
These three are built on a core of a few RF generators and crafting machines.
About Bees
The bees (And trees) in forestry have genes that determine their properties: Their operating range, temperature and humidity tolerance etc, and what kind of flowers they like. One of the genes determines the species - which defines the visual appearance, the unique output, what further species mutations are available, the preferred humidity and climate, as well as a set of default genes that are applied when the species is first mutated.
By mixing different species - as a princess and drones - in the same hive, you can cause the species gene to mutate, yielding additional species, and this is the core gameplay mechanic of this branch of Forestry - trying to mutate the species until you attain a species that has the required output.
Forestry uses mendelian genetics, where the drones and princesses each carry 2 sets of genes, a primary set and a recessive set. Drones with identical primary and recessive sets will stack, which will play a big part in all your efforts to breed different gene lines. Princesses and queens never stack. As a queen represents a mated princess, she actually represents 4 sets of genes - a visible set belonging to the princess, and a hidden set from the male she was bred with, and all the bees she produces will be a random mix (as per Mendel) of her, and the drones genes.
This all sounds very complicated, because it is.
That said - the only way to learn how all this actually applies is to get started. To start Forestry you need to make enough machines to start producing seed oil, that will be used in the Carpenter to make other Forestry things. "Plain" Forestry is not possible in skyblocks as Forestry typically relies on worldgen in biomes and villages for players to find the starting "tier 0" or Hive bees: Meadow, Plains, Jungle etc.
Place scented hives in the world, and if the conditions are right (biomes and things near the hive) it may (eventually) transform into a Forestry worldgen hive - that you will harvest with a scoop.
NB: To make things extra grindy, some of the princesses you get are called "ignoble" (and others "pristine"). The ignoble princesses have a property in that they will eventually produce no princess amongst their offspring. I normally keep these just to trade to villagers, in a skyblock I would just dispose of them, put them in decorative "bee houses", or carefully use them for some non critical production.
Your first breeding:
The very first bees you want to obtain are meadows and forest.
Place a princess and a drone from each species in an Apiary, and you will get a "Queen". If you let her sit in the Apiary for long enough, and the conditions are correct (view of sky, daytime, not raining, biome temperature and humidity, available nearby flowers are typical problems) she will produce some combs, and then die, producing a princess and drones. This princess and these drones will probably not stack as their genes will be a chaotic mess, which is going to be super annoying: If you are lucky, the mix of meadows and forest caused some of the bees to spawn with a mutates species gene as "Common Species". Some of the meadows / forest drones might actually have common, but as a recessive trait.
Place (your best guess) as to your best common bees in an Apiary and breed those, and repeat this process - breeding the commons together - until you start getting drones that stack. Stacking drones after a breeding cycle indicate the drones and princess have the same genes, and you now have a stable population of common bees.
Success.
You now want to breed common with meadows/forest to produce Cultivated, Cultivated with Common to produce Noble and Industrious, and those again with cultivated to produce the bees in the Noble and Industrious bee lines.
And, as you get these bees, automate them (using stacks of drones in Apiaries and pipes to pull all the bees (And produce) out and put the bees back in), to get the combs and honey, pollen and royal jelly that you need in the production of Alveary components.
By spinning the honey combs in a Centrifuge you are also getting Bees wax and honey drops. Honey drops can be used in your beealyzer that will show you the dominant and recessive genes of your bees (but not the hidden "drone" genes your queens carry).
Some Advances
Don't bother with the frames in Apiaries. If you are going to use bees for production, you are going to upgrade to Alvearies, which is a 3x3x3 "hive" that has 10x the output of an Apiary.
Get out of this as fast as possible. Every mod pack with Forestry typically adds mods like "Genetics" that add machines that allow deterministic breeding of bees, and the "capture" of and direct application of beneficial genes.
These mods take "base forestry genetics" that will literally consume months of your life and turn it into something that you can make progress on in mere hours and sometimes tens of minutes!
"Shortest Lifespan" is a good gene to have to breed into species as it allows for a quick turn around when breeding mutations if you don't have "murder" frames available.
"Longest Lifespan" on the other hand is good for production bees where you don't really want to spend all your time binning excess drones.