How do you keep the bee you want?

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Galaxystarr

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Jul 29, 2019
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Ok i am getting started with all this bee thing but when i am cross breeding, i generally have 1 drone after all that things i have done to get that bee. Let's say it's an imperial bee, i have one imperial drone after a long and painful breeding-time and i am afraid to lose it. I mean what if i put a cultivated queen with imperial drone and the results are all cultivated bees? If i have only one drone or one queen for the specie i want, how to stick to them? Breeding them with common bees? Please help
 

Grydian2

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Jul 29, 2019
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You need to use a beealizer to find out the dormant trait in the bees. Each bee is an active and dormant trait. Once you have two pure bred bees mating you will always have that type. But when you are cross breeding often you will get hybrids. So make sure to analyze each bee.
 

snooder

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Jul 29, 2019
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Ok i am getting started with all this bee thing but when i am cross breeding, i generally have 1 drone after all that things i have done to get that bee. Let's say it's an imperial bee, i have one imperial drone after a long and painful breeding-time and i am afraid to lose it. I mean what if i put a cultivated queen with imperial drone and the results are all cultivated bees? If i have only one drone or one queen for the specie i want, how to stick to them? Breeding them with common bees? Please help

Breed another set of the same type of bee.

You ought to be getting 2 drones each time you breed bees. If not, you bred in low fertility somewhere along the line and need to restart the process with non-rocky bees.

So let's say you breed majestic + noble and get: Maj/Nob princess, Maj/Nob drone, Imp drone. Keep the imperial drone in a chest somewhere and breed the Maj/Nob princess to the Maj/Nob drone. Repeat until you get an imperial princess.

The other option is to run multiple breeding lines at once. I usually breed 3 or 4 sets of bees at the same time when I'm working up to imperial and industrious bees. Even if you only get a drone with one set, you are likely to get a princess with another.
 

netmc

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Jul 29, 2019
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If I am manually breeding bees (and not using any of the extra bees machines), the first trait I work for is the 4x fertility from the icy branch. This way I have 4 chances every generation for getting the mutation/traits I want in a bee. I normally end up with a lot of marble bees, so I use them for most of my cross breeding.

Once I have a 4x fertility, I try breeding the 4x trait back into the normal marble line, so I end up with a bee that will work in normal environments and with the 4x fertility (I don't care about any other traits although I will try and breed out the freezing effect). Next, I breed a common line and cultivated line both with 4x fertility. I try and retain the fast trait on the cultivated line. the only traits I worry about at this point is Fast worker and 4x fertility. I don't care about any of the others.

My next step is to breed a cultivated queen with a rocky drone. Since this combination will not mutate into any other bee, it gives me a chance to get the 4x fertillity into the rocky branch and all the awesome tolerances into the cultivated line.

I do this trick with ANY of the lines that only have 1x offspring. I breed the drones of the line with a 4x fertility queen (hopefully one that won't mutate with it). This way, I have 4 chances the with the first crossbreeding to get a 4x fertility in as many places as possible. This is the trait I care about the most. If the offspring doesn't have the 4x fertility trait in any spot, I discard it, repurify my princess back to 4x fertility if needed and try again with another drone.

Sometimes I lose the species I wanted, so i end up back at the drawing board and start over. Other times, the RNG gods smile on me and I get the combination I want, and continue purifying the traits until I end up with a rocky bee with all the awesome traits and 4x fertility, and a cultivated bee with 4x fertility, fast worker, and all the tolerances. From there I purify my common line using the rocky bees and another mundane or cross-breeding with my existing common until I have a 4x fertility, fast worker and all the tolerances from the rocky line.

This normally takes several generations to accomplish, but if you have a valiant bee line making cocoa combs, you can create some cocoa frames and place in the hive which causes the production to go up, but greatly decreases bee life. 3 of those in a apiary makes quick work of the generation.

I hope this helps a bit.

p.s. If I am mutating a bee, I will mutate several of them until I get multiples with the desired new bee species in 1 spot, or a purebred. When I breed the new bee with my cross breeding line, the only traits I pay attention to at first are the bee species, and any special traits that attached to the new bee species. All the other traits can be bred back in once I have the line stabilized the new line.
 

Quesenek

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Jul 29, 2019
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Look into the extra bees machines there are tons of tutorials on youtube and around the net on them.
They will make you love bees instead of hating them when you lose your only imperial bee making you start from scratch again.

BTW when you make the serums keep them in a safe so they cannot be blown up.
 
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Bagman817

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Jul 29, 2019
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Be advised, if you're using Extra Bees Machines, make sure you have a solid power infrastructure in place. Those machines take anywhere from 25 to 100 MJ/tick.
 

Bomb Bloke

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Jul 29, 2019
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In short, ignore the basic genetic machines to start with, the acclimatiser need only ever be used once and is of zero value after (but don't worry, it'll chew up a lot of your time when you DO come to use it - though it helps to know that you only ever need put sand and ice into it, don't bother about the other resources, those two'll give you max tolerance to everything if you put in enough), and the sequencer is just plain rubbish (it lets you make "templates" of bees, but only of the first few races; it doesn't work on, say, imperials).

The advanced machines are excellent, but they rely on serums, and those require royal jelly (produced by imperials) to make the vials. Sorry, but bee machines won't help you get that species; from there though, it's up up and away.

Get the genepool and start filling tanks with your spare drones. Do this early, even if you don't have any serum vials or the other machines that use the liquid DNA this produces yet. When you can make the vials, get the isolator and start throwing in drones (NOT princesses) and empty serums. Specifically, you want to throw in bees with max fertility and the shortest lifespan traits.

Ignore the replicator, it's a waste of a diamond unless you want to give serums to other players. Your synthesiser and purifier will eat liquid DNA, so hopefully you've got a reserve saved up by the time you build them - the bit about waiting until the purifier says it's done is important, don't just wait until the serum quality is reported as "excellent", it'll end in tears. Always perform synthesis prior to purification.

The inoculator randomly applies the trait in the serum to either the active or inactive side of the bees you put in at random (whizzball's off the mark in saying it always does the inactive trait first). Because you want both traits done, expect to use about four serum charges per bee on average (minimum of two). Don't innoculate queens, the drones they produce may not get the effects - instead, fully innoculate a princess and then drone before breeding them together.

To apply all this to getting new species, take a princess and drone of the two parent races - say you're aiming for industrious, you'd get diligent and unweary - and fully inoculate them with shortest lifespan and max fertility. Let the two pairs breed with their matching race a few times over until you have a stack each of identical drones.

Then, take a princess of one type and run it through an apiary with drones of the other type and a set of soul frames. Analyse ALL the results, not just the ones that come out looking like industrious, and throw all the drones with the desired race as a primary and/or secondary trait into the isolator. Any drones produced that aren't industrious get thrown into the gene pool.

If you get the industrious serum, well done, pump it up to about 8-10 charges and inoculate a max fert/shortest life princess and drone with it (remember those stacks of drones you made? Breeding ANY princess with them over and over will quickly turn it into a clone of them, which'll then start producing drones you can ADD to the stacks...). Now empty the serum vial and put it back into the isolator - create a new drone stack, and use THAT to convert further princesses.

If the new race has any other traits you want (eg a new effect), keep going with the soul frames until the resulting drones have given you all the serums you want. Apply that to an old drone and princess (ones with other good traits on 'em) along with the new racial serum, then breed them together over and over to produce a new drone stack. The princess used to produce the new race should be bred with that stack (or some other one) to stamp out all the undesired traits the new species introduced. You'll quickly find that attempting to use the bee machines to "fix" the traits on every new species is a complete waste of time - drone stacks let you modify multiple traits on a princess at once, serums can only do them individually. Because you'll always be wanting to create new stacks, don't throw out your apiarys once you start building alvearys - those smaller hive boxes are great for drone production.

If you DON'T get the industrious serum, put the princess back into the apiary and crank out another four drones. There's no harm in doing this while waiting for the isolator to do its work, assuming you don't mind wasting soul frames.

It's a very good idea to grant a rocky princess and drone max fertility as soon as you can, as these work during rain, at night, in caves, and have a respectable tolerance to temperature and humidity. Produce a stack of drones, breed them with other princesses to create clones, then inoculate new racial serums over the top of the results. Boom, a new race with all the benefits of rocky bees, plus any other decent traits you happen to throw in over time...