My attempt at bee housing

[DeathOfTime]

Have spent the last few days on this...slowly expanding it. Just added the top set of houses....got it working too..the top ones aren't directly above the bottom ones...So that the bottom ones can still get direct sun.

I put signs on the gold pipe leading out of each house that is in use...to label the current occupant...not really visible in this. The entire surrounding structure is Tinkers Construct's clear glass...which makes it hard to see.

On the right of the pic...if the pic is visible (I use photobucket...just prefer to) ...are the bee houses I use for breeding new bees types. I put gold pipes with autarchic gates on the top to tell me when I need to check them.

Found I have to place the flowers for the second tier of houses practically right on the houses to get the bees to recognize them...I tried several other flower arrangements.
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I play on peaceful. I tried the peace tables to get mob drops. Didn't work all that well for the ender pearls I needed. Got a less then a stack of ender pearls and a diamond chest full of other monster drops....so the ender pearls where cheated up...like most the other monster drops I use.

The bees and everything else I can find on peaceful though is gotten through playing through the game.
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Tried using Thermal Expansion's Item transfer pipes...the don't work at all like I need them to and I don't have any real experience with any other piping system other then Builcraft's, and TE's. I know a little of logistics...just haven't tried it yet.

Kind of showing off my hard work...and a little asking better ways to handle the technical side...like better piping systems and such....?

Still haven't figured out the purpose to having bees. Just having fun getting everything up and running.

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Edit:
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decide I needed to add the other half the house...the bee processing area....uses one aparist and one diamond pipe to route all the items that come from the bee house...the combs go to the centrigure then on the the diamond chest...the sugar goes directly to the diamond chest...which I will do to the rest of the non-comb items as the appear in the system.I added a large barrel to take care of all the wax that comes out of the centrifuge......the cluster of three chest is for any bees that enter the system. two iron for princesses and queens that should never make it that far and one diamond for the overflow of drones from the bee housing....the steel tank is for liquid DNA....

As of now I manually ID bees...throwing the ones I don't want into the DNA extractor.....

Edit:
Moved the barrel ...after I noticed I couldn't open the chest underneath it...hadn't noticed that before...LoL....

 

[Wagon153]

AE has compatibility with Forestry and Extra Bees, so that could be used as well. But yeah, this looks cool! Good work!

 

[DeathOfTime]

Thanks....I wasn't for sure how this thread would measure up ...when I see all the awesome stuff people do on this forum....

I haven't set up a AE network yet....I had one in a previous world...just to store items...I moved most the items around using Logistic Pipes.

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Finally remembered...this was built on a a large lake that got a quarry used on it. Then leveled with dirt. Beside it is another square of water..left over from another quarry...I haven't gotten to leveling that one yet. They are 64*64 Quarries....that is why everything looks so flat.

 

[Henry Link]

Still haven't figured out the purpose to having bees. Just having fun getting everything up and running.

The bees can be what you make of it. In my case I have two pairs of refined bees and they produce more then enough fuel to power 70+ compression dynamos from TE.

 

[midi_sec]

nice, i like bees. if you ran a different pipe setup, oriented and configured properly you can stack them next to eachother and double the number of apiaries in your area.

use wooden pipe - iron pipe - apiarist pipe. set up the apiarist pipe to "any bee" and the color that leads back into your apiary, and then set "anything" towards your comb/drone pipe on all apiaries in your rig.

    Ap A
    I  W

^funny things can happen with this rarely, and only when running multiple species in the same apiary line. when one apiary towards the front of the line is doing a drone/princess switch, if another set of drones is coming up the line they can hop out and contaminate. i usually only run one species in a setup like this. early mass production, pre-alveary.

or factorization routers. 3 routers will serve a battery of apiaries, and avoid those problems.

 

[Adonis0]

I personally use translocators and thermal expansion to manage my bees
(Using translocators because it looks awesome)

Then to process, I'm using Remote IO + translocators and AE

 

[KingTriaxx]

midi_sec: Shouldn't that Iron and Wooden be reversed? Otherwise the wooden is pulling from nothing.

 

[midi_sec]

nah, BC pipes are cool like that. they can pull from any side of an apiary.

these are valid configurations.

i use iron pipe because you can stack them like this

and this.

they all use the common drone/item pipe outputting to the diamond chest in the background (AE works too, but that's not very early). this works best on pure single species lines to avoid funny problems; they go in this rig after you've isolated all the genes and all that.

you could use another apiarist pipe instead of irons, but that's 2 propolis and 2 diamond each. i know i've got autarchic gates pictured as well, but very early game you can use redstone engines.

edit: noticed the irons in the first two pics, and also the second row of the third pic needed to be wrenched yet, but you get the idea.

 

[DeathOfTime]

Thanks midi_sec...I like pics of how other do things...I have tried some of the transportation systems recommended in this thread and none of them seam to work for multi-species housing....and mine doesn't seem to work very well either, I have had one case of a missing queen that I couldn't figure out.

and in the third picture...the first tier of housing wouldn't get enough sun for the bees. With the other housing being right on top it.....That is a problem I had when setting up my housing. That is why I staggered them so that the top ones wouldn't be directly above the bottom ones.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Ah. I mis-read the diagram. It looked like the wooden pipe was pulling from the Apiarist Pipe, rather than the Apiary.

 

[kittle]

You can skip the iron pipes if you use alternating stone / cobble pipes, since they dont connect to each other. Less resources early game.

As for AE compatibility ... it "mostly" works. I almost always endup with a chest full of non-stackable drones with random mutations. or the queen will mutate somehow and then the export bus wont pick it up anymore. Tried using a fuzzy export bus, but they end up mixing species when I dont want it.

I only use bees to pollinate forestry trees and collect honey, so I dont want them breeding.

 

[RealSketch]

Good design and functionality, I would make a building around it, but that's me.
Anyway, how the flip do you get the power to get those GATES!
I'm still using redstone engines!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Adonis0]

Question:
Would you be interested in seeing my bee set-up?
It's not finished, but it's done enough to see the gist of how things will work out in the end

It uses a different set of mods for bee management than the standard buildcraft set-up

 

[RealSketch]

Question:
Would you be interested in seeing my bee set-up?
It's not finished, but it's done enough to see the gist of how things will work out in the end

It uses a different set of mods for bee management than the standard buildcraft set-up

Yeah sure!!!

 

[DeathOfTime]

Good design and functionality, I would make a building around it, but that's me.
Anyway, how the flip do you get the power to get those GATES!
I'm still using redstone engines!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am using a nether lava pump....hooked to a tesseract....If I played on anything but peaceful...with some creative thrown in for mob drops...I would have ran out of ender pearls a long time ago...I have so many tesseracts and autaorchic gates laying around.

Question:
Would you be interested in seeing my bee set-up?
It's not finished, but it's done enough to see the gist of how things will work out in the end

It uses a different set of mods for bee management than the standard buildcraft set-up

I would definately ....really really ....like to see it....that was the other point to this thread...a place for others to show off how they do things.....

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I finally got 2 alvearies going....now I just need a better source for seed oil....I am always running low.

 

[midi_sec]

Anyway, how the flip do you get the power to get those GATES!
I'm still using redstone engines!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

use autarchic gates and set them to pulse when items are in inventory

 

[RealSketch]

use autarchic gates and set them to pulse when items are in inventory

I think I'll stick with engines for now, I tried making some, too pricy for me!

 

[midi_sec]

oh they're pricy, definitely not an early game item.

 

[RealSketch]

oh they're pricy, definitely not an early game item.

lol!

 

[Adonis0]

Alright, Since my bee set-up is in stages, I'll try to separate it out

First up is my breeding area

Spoiler

So this is just a simple cluster of hives which surround a fair chunk of flowers required by bees, I add in different types as needed. Bee transfer managed by translocators, which brings the combs and excess drones to here. I have the diamond chest filled up with combs just incase I need them for the escritoire mini-game. The rest go to the ender chest to be moved to stage two.

Stage Two:

Spoiler

So, in this room I process excess drones into liquid dna, and break them down into traits, also processing combs and sorting out the serum vials. Moving combs and drones around I'm just using itemducts, no need to show that. The ME chest stores all the comb products, and the chest next to it passes serums to the next stage (shh... that comes later).

However, In the background of the second picture here, you can see how I deal with the serums, the two chests at the top are also involved. I'm using a combination of Remote IO and translocators.

Spoiler

A close up on how I'm sorting out serums, It's a tileable set-up of 3x3, by 2 deep, in the first picture my crosshairs is sort of on the break between the two segments.
So firstly, new serums from the isolators are extracted to a single location. The remote IO block in the center is linked to that block. From there the translocators check if I already have that serum in the third chest, and if not send it to the furnaces.

For those that don't know how translocators work, the one that's blue (diamond nugget upgrade) is set to keep one of each serum it's filtered to, the one with the red dots (redstone upgrade) leads to the furnaces and it is the last preferred route, so all excess goes there.

Onto Stage three.

Stage Three

Spoiler

So, this is a set-up using AE, and thermal expansion to automatically fill up any empty serums that come to this stage. AE keeps only full serums, so I've got an export bus which is passes any vials that aren't full out to a synthesiser, then when those are finished, those go to a purifier, which then pass them back to the AE system. I've also got a bunch of innoculators there too incase I want to inject some bees.

Lastly

The Archives

Spoiler

Down here is a WIP. I'm planning on having two hives for each bee species, these are set-up to pass drones back and forth, so if I fill them up with a stack of drones of desired species, i can insert any princess to have the species pushed to it for breeding purposes.

Now to explain the pictures. The first picture is a shot of my beastly innoculator set-up, There's an innoculator for every trait except for species. This is so that the bees can actually last down underground and produce a lot of combs. The item-ducts pull empty serums out of the innoculators, and put them back in once they're full (keeping the same type in the same innoculator, so no trait can be missed out)

The second picture is a shot of my hives, there is a duplicate set-up on the other side of the wall, since translocators are faster than item-ducts in recognising there are items in its inventory, the princess and drones will be pulled out of it if they can fit in the hives. Any excess drones and combs are pulled out back into the ender chest to pass them back to stage two.

The last picture is a set-up I have underneath the ender chest, I'm attempting to have a stock of every type of comb on hand, and excess is allowed to be taken by stage two, but I'm not entirely sure that's working.. >.>


Thus ends my tour, if you want I can do a little tutorial on any part of it, I'll have to recreate it so you can see it properly though, so that's why it's not in this set of pictures