General: Bees

[namiasdf]

How do they work?

By breeding bees you get more bees and more types, but how automated can you make this system? You guys talking about producing irridium from platinum generated by bees, has got me interested.

I guess I could figure it out myself, but it'd be nice to hear your inputs, and compare them.

i.e. I'm mostly interested in how much regular input time I would need to maintain such a system. Time is money, and automation is key in FTB.

 

[Oatmonster]

Bees can take quite a bit of effort to get fully into, but they can have a huge payout in the long run.

I definitely encourage you to tinker a bit with bees to see if you like the way they work. They can sometimes be a bit finicky, but they love it when you treat them right. The biggest piece of advice I can give you is to set up your bee operation in a plains biome that is near a couple other biomes like deserts or snowy biomes. I made the mistake of setting up my base in a savannah and had to do most of my bee breeding in the river that ran through it because most bees don't like the hot and arid climate of the Savannah.

The breeding of bees for mutations is very hard to automate and should be done manually. It might be possible with the misc. peripherals bee analyzer but you would need some crazy programming skills and it wouldn't be worth the effort as you usually only need to get a pure pair of each species once.

The automation of pure (not the species) bees for their effects/products is very with apiarists frames. Just have an apiary/alveary with your pure pair attached to a wooden transport pipe and autarchic gate set to if redstone signal off, energy pulse. have the wooden pipe feed up once into a stone/cobblestone/golden transport pipe which connects to an apiarist's pipe on top of the apiary/alveary. Set the apiarist's pipe to pump anything into a chest connected to it and any bee into the apiary.

Bees can be a very real source of some of the rarer metals/gems. Once you have them set up the right way, they are zero cost (unless you want to add frames which is a whole other thing).

If you have a fairly strong MJ system and a couple stacks of junk bees for melting, the extra bee's genetic machines can make getting awesome traits a bit easier. Basically, traits can such as productivity, fertility, and species can be taken out of a bee (at the cost of the bee's life) and then injected into other bees at will. The process costs a fair bit of MJ (one of the machine works best at 100 MJ/t) and you need a lot of junk bees that you can melt in a genepool for liquid DNA. However, if you have the system to support it, you can easily get bees that work fast 24/7 just about anywhere you want.

My favorite technique is to manually breed up to a species that I want, and then use the loop I mentioned earlier to get a few spare drones of that species. I then extract the species serum for that bee and inject it into rocky bees along with fast productivity and high fertility serums. Rocky bees are great for this because they naturally have great temperature and humidity tolerances, work during the night and rain, and are very plentiful if you go caving often/quarry a lot.

Some very interesting bees are those added by thaumic bees. They can have profound effects on your aura, with some being able to suck up flux, while others can produce hundreds of vis in their lifetimes.

Early bees won't give you too much if you are persistent and know what you are doing, they will basically make every single resource renewable.

 

[namiasdf]

That reply just about made it for me.

There are many modpacks I want to get into, but for now stablizing my EU/MJ situation is my main focus. That and setting up a few low EU factories as to get some productivity down. They don't work indoors do they? What about high altitudes?

My base is to say the least.... unmovable.

 

[Oatmonster]

Bees are definitely a lot easier to manage if you already have the infrastructure set up to run your base.

If you're up for it, there are a lot of methods for producing energy from bees. The most common method is to get a few bees from the oily branch and then using the oil they produce to power steam boilers or generators. Bees from the infernal branch can also be used as they produce phosphor which can be processed into lava.

The youtuber GenerikB is setting up an interesting system where he uses thaumic bees to produce vis which gets turned into EU by a magic energy absorber (although this is pretty late game) and then using more bees to clean up the flux produced.

Youtube can be a very good resource for information and tips for bees. GenerikB has a "BEEcademy" series in which he shows some of the basics for bees. Florastar also has a Bee University series (which was actually GenerikB's inspiration. She even has a bee item in the game named after her!

Altitude isn't a factor but most bees need to have their apiary/alveary exposed to direct sunlight, meaning there are no blocks above it. Bees with the cave dweller trait do not need sunlight and with the late game genetic machines, any bee can get that trait.

To be honest, when you're just starting out with bees, a few apiaries out in a field is really all you need.

One resource you will need is seed oil. To start off with, bonemealing flax plants and then breaking both portions of the plant will probably give you the most oil. This can be easily automated with block breakers and deployers. This would be fairly easy if you had some sort of skeleton grinder. A sulfur torch farm for sulfur goo is also a very viable option as it has zero running cost and depending on the number of sulfur torches you use, it can be pretty fast (sulfur goo works like bonemeal). If you're into tree breeding, breeding up to walnut/chestnut and then occasionally harvesting a few trees will give you more seed oil then you know what to do with.

A resource worth checking out if you want spoilers is this bee wiki. It's the best one I've seen.