getting started with bee breeding.

  • Please make sure you are posting in the correct place. Server ads go here and modpack bugs go here
  • The FTB Forum is now read-only, and is here as an archive. To participate in our community discussions, please join our Discord! https://ftb.team/discord
Flipz said:
Wait--I thought quarries would just break the hives without yielding bees.

I've avoided quarries for all this time for NO REASON WHATSOEVER?! :eek: :(
Click to expand...
yep. 5-10 for a max quarry. at least the drones stack so it doesnt clog too bad.

wow. within a few generations ive gotten one each, a meadows/arid, a cultivated/NOBLE, and a cultivated/diligint. the cultivated ones came almost back-to-back, and the meadows came about the same time.

still working on stabilizing my meadow, common, and cultivated lines.
gonna need to roll the RNG again to see if i can get an extra princess or two for the common, cultivated, and go hive hunting for a few other species. (ill spawn the things in, but i want to look first, how rare are water hives anyway?)
i dont want to burn my only water princess with a rocky with all of them having x1 fert, and im not sure what ill get with a common. (no spoilers please)
sheesh. and i thought the world of tanks RNG got funky.
looking foward to messing with the sorcerous bees. already got a couple magic wax from the combs.
 
I'd been running a couple of quarries for a while, feeding directly into an AE system, before I decided to "see what this bee business was about".

At some point after manually searching for Rocky hives I accidentally typed some search into the AE monitor that showed bees and to my surprise I already had about 30 pairs of Rocky bees! That was like a bee Christmas :D
 
  • Like
Reactions: SpitefulFox
eric167 said:
yep. 5-10 for a max quarry. at least the drones stack so it doesnt clog too bad.

wow. within 5 generations ive gotten one each, a meadows/arid, a cultivated/NOBLE, and a cultivated/diligint.

still working on stabilizing my meadow, common, and cultivated lines.
gonna need to roll the RNG again to see if i can get an extra princess or two for the common, cultivated, and go hive hunting for a few other species. (ill spawn the things in, but i want to look first, how rare are water hives anyway?)
i dont want to burn my only water princess with a rocky with all of them having x1 fert, and im not sure what ill get with a common. (no spoilers please)
sheesh. and i thought the world of tanks RNG got funky.
looking foward to messing with the sorcerous bees. already got a couple magic wax from the combs.
Click to expand...

Water bees are pretty common. Look inside lakes to get them.
 
hm. stabilizing some of these is tricky.
so is getting the drones to stack. exact same stats, try to stack em 5 times, nothing. come back to the chest with another bee, try again, it works. wut?
is there a better way to get these things to stack or no?
 
eric167 said:
hm. stabilizing some of these is tricky.
so is getting the drones to stack. exact same stats, try to stack em 5 times, nothing. come back to the chest with another bee, try again, it works. wut?
is there a better way to get these things to stack or no?
Click to expand...

It does that sometimes. Drop them on the floor and repick them. If you get two piles it is because of dominant and recessive species types.
 
A further question to my question from before how do you know when you get to the end of the bee line is there some way to tell?
 
Skavid said:
A further question to my question from before how do you know when you get to the end of the bee line is there some way to tell?
Click to expand...

End Of Line bees tend to have a glowy effect on them. Or, you can just look up spoilers to see if there's any other bees in that branch.
 
Something to note: intelligent bee-breeding is next to impossible without a beealyzer--once you've got one of those, bee-breeding becomes infinitely easier. ;)

eric167 said:
yep. 5-10 for a max quarry. at least the drones stack so it doesnt clog too bad.

wow. within a few generations ive gotten one each, a meadows/arid, a cultivated/NOBLE, and a cultivated/diligint. the cultivated ones came almost back-to-back, and the meadows came about the same time.

still working on stabilizing my meadow, common, and cultivated lines.
gonna need to roll the RNG again to see if i can get an extra princess or two for the common, cultivated, and go hive hunting for a few other species. (ill spawn the things in, but i want to look first, how rare are water hives anyway?)
i dont want to burn my only water princess with a rocky with all of them having x1 fert, and im not sure what ill get with a common. (no spoilers please)
sheesh. and i thought the world of tanks RNG got funky.
looking foward to messing with the sorcerous bees. already got a couple magic wax from the combs.
Click to expand...

If you check the beealyzer, you'll see a "fertility" indicator, indicating the number of drones the queen will create when she dies. One of the hive bees from out in the world has a fertility of 4, which is the highest possible fertility for any bee. If you breed a princess from the 4x fertile species with other drones, you should be able, with care, to purify those other species while keeping the 4x fertility trait, making future bee work MUCH easier. :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: eric167
Being a novice beekeeper myself, I have only one piece of advice to give you: you need patience. Even if you have oblivion frames, getting your bees to work as you want might take quite a few tries, which can get annoying pretty quickly. The beginning (the path to Imperial/Industrious) is the worst part in my opinion, since your only way to boost the mutation chance is using soul frames, which aren't fast enough nor give a good enough mutation boost, so it most likely will take quite a lot of time until bees. And even then prepare to enjoy getting bees with bad traits just because the RNG despises you (I only noticed my Cultivated bees had slowest productivity when I tried to make my other bees faster a long time after I got them, for example).

Also, here's a useful tip: if you don't use Dartcraft (which means your chances to get oblivion frames are considerably lower), the best way to kill queens in one tick is using 2 to 3 necrotic frames from Magic Bees, since chocolate frames were nerfed recently. Also, don't worry, because all frames from that mod don't consume vis anymore.

Another useful tip would be learning how to use the escritoire, if you have enough combs/bees/Forestry saplings you can farm mutation info and bee products as much as you want with them.
 
  • Like
Reactions: eric167 and SpitefulFox
Why can't I manage to get Rocky bees with 4x fertility by breeding the drones with Wintry princesses? I've run the cycle three times and haven't gotten a single Rocky with fertility. :(

I've gotten Meadows bees with 3x fertility and Forest drones with 2x, so I know it's not impossible, but I just can't seem to get the right combo. :/
 
Flipz said:
Why can't I manage to get Rocky bees with 4x fertility by breeding the drones with Wintry princesses? I've run the cycle three times and haven't gotten a single Rocky with fertility. :(

I've gotten Meadows bees with 3x fertility and Forest drones with 2x, so I know it's not impossible, but I just can't seem to get the right combo. :/
Click to expand...

The best advice I can give you is make sure you are using the Beealyzer on all the drones. It's the only way to know for sure what traits the bee has and make sure you choose the "best" drone to breed.

And as Revemohl said, you'll need patience! :)
 
i must be having the best of luck.
ive gotten an anchient PRINCESSm with elongated life, and FOUR diligent drones.
not to try and stabilize the lines. i also have a coupe bees with the -noble hybrid trait.
totally seperate lines, but they came out at the same time.

ive also gotten the fast/elongated for both active and inactive on the anchient line im trying to purify.
stabilized the diligent. first non-bee useful sideproduct.
 
The beealyzer is the most useful item in the whole world of bees.
eric167 said:
i must be having the best of luck.
ive gotten an anchient PRINCESSm with elongated life, and FOUR diligent drones.
not to try and stabilize the lines. i also have a coupe bees with the -noble hybrid trait.
totally seperate lines, but they came out at the same time.
Click to expand...

Yeah the diligent and noble mutations both come from the same drone pairing (cultivated/common).
 
  • Like
Reactions: eric167
fun times. trying to stabilize the anchients, ive gotten it to fast/elongated, but all i have to match are cultivated/anchient and an/cu hybrids.
update. just got it. and since its still a cultivated hybrid, honey comb, anchient comb, on permenant fast/elongated!!!
diligent is stable.
only one bee with the -noble on it.
no spare princesses to make one with. seriously. you gotta go collect wild bees just for the princess stock. would be nice if there was a (very) rare chance to get a 2nd princess.
fun times.
 
I'll try to explain what I did, it took me about 4 hours to get to imperial/industrious.

edit: THERE ARE TWO MAIN CONCEPTS YOU WILL WANT TO UNDERSTAND:

Mutating: Breeding for mutation is the pairing of two bees which will mutate when bred together. They have a chance at producing a "mutated" bee, which might be the next tier of bee. Bees that mutated when bred together can be found on the bee breeds wiki.

Bee conversion: By breeding a non-mutating pair of bees together, you have a chance at converting either of the bee into the other. This means you risk converting both bees into the type you didn't want, which is why I suggest stabilizing a pair before doing this. Stabilizing will be explained later in this post.

GETTING INDUSTRIOUS/IMPERIAL FOR ALVEARY PRODUCTION:

By breeding meadows/forest together you have a chance at getting common. What you want to do once you get a common PRINCESSES and a common DRONE, is to breed them together until they become a stable pair. This means that the drones will stack together after every life cycle. Once you have the ability to reproduce common drones, begin breeding your meadows/forest PRINCESSES with common DRONES in attempts to get the cultivated bee. Again, try to stabilize that species.

After that, by breeding a common with a cultivated bee you have a chance to produce the starter bee for either the industrious branch or the imperial branch. These are known as the noble and the diligent. Once you get a common/princess pair for either, begin to stabilize those.

By breeding the noble/diligent with the cultivated bee (similar to breeding common with meadows/forest) you can get the next tier of bee in either branch, unweary and imperial. By breeding unweary with diligent or imperial and noble, you may receive an industrious or imperial bee, respectively.

Tips for starting:

1. Stabilizing bee pairs will ensure you don't lose that species. Sometimes the mutation will go the wrong way (i.e. If you got a common drone and tried to convert a meadows princess to common by breeding them together, you might get a meadows drone & princess back, losing the common bee).

2. The more princesses you can get and the more apiaries you have running at the same time will greatly increase the chances you will get the mutation you want. When I started breeding I had 15 apiaries running constantly. This kept me busy the entire time, but I was able to breed multiple pairs of the precursors to the mutations I wanted.

3. Use frames early to get honey. Honey is essential in breeding, as it is required in the beealyzer. For breeding you will want to identify the bees that have the "shortest life" trait and continue to use those. You may want to find the "fastest worker" trait and continue to use those as well. By filtering out the "longer life" and "slowest worker" traits, you can begin to selectively breed your bees for success.

4. If you are in a snow biome, apparently snow bees have the 4x offspring modifier. This means they will produce 4 bees at the end of a life cycle. This is important because it'll increase the chances that a trait you wanted bred into the bee, will persist.

5. Most of learning how to play with bees is by experience. I didn't understand what most of this stuff meant until I mucked around in the mud for a bit. After a while you should get the hang of it and understand bees in your own language and develop your own strategies. Mine worked for me, simply because I'm a persistent bastard.

edit: You can replace the breeding of the common drone with any mundane bee (forest, snow, rocky, jungle, etc.)
 
  • Like
Reactions: eric167
question: does extra bees automatically detect the presence of GT and enable the relevant bees?

still gotta hive-hunt for more princesses to use for mutations.
keeping a chest with one each of the stabilized species as backups/production.

thanks for all the help people. loving the mod.
 
Reviving topic because I'd rather have all this juicy beginner's bees info in one place rather than spread across the forum. ;)

I've done quite a bit of bee breeding, including using the Escritoire to unlock a few "extra" paths (protip: don't spend any combs until you've successfully matched the first pair on your own--that way you save combs, and for certain early-game bee species you can actually turn a profit, albeit a small one; also, the escritoire seems to be a good way to get specialties and secondary products faster than with apiaries).

I now have two species of bees exhibiting the same problem: the drones refuse to stack, even though every single gene (including the "generations in captivity" tracker) are the same. Dropping the bees on the ground and picking them up doesn't help, either. I have a completely pure Frigid line going, but the bees absolutely refuse to stack, and now the Bleached line I'm using for breeding (I accidentally ended up with pure 4x fertility on the princess and drones when I managed to stabilize the species :P ) is doing the same thing. Why? :confused:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom