Sorry or the late reply I never noticed your question before. I've not done anything special to get the different kinds of flower to spawn, I have biomes o' plenty enabled in my world which adds al the extra colours as far as I know.
Tell me about your bees
- Thread starter Larmonade
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Sorry or the late reply I never noticed your question before. I've not done anything special to get the different kinds of flower to spawn, I have biomes o' plenty enabled in my world which adds al the extra colours as far as I know.
I think for drones it could mean they could transfer the swarmer trait onto their offspring.
you usually get the swarmer trait on your bees if you make them work too hard, like using too many frames on them
Their Offsrpring is likely to have that trait too. But if you mate them with a non-swarmer princess the trait will not pass on the princess
Okay. I think that I've got a...path. I think I know what to do from start to ...whenever. Let's go down a sorta pared down checklist here:
1) collect a bunch of bees.
2) breed bees within their breed in order to get stacks of drones
3) use those stacks of drones to cross-breed with other species, aiming in particular for imperial and industrious for making new machines and such.
4) once getting some breeds with desirable traits, use the isolator to get a serum of those traits.
5) increase the quality of the serum and inoculate a target princess and drone with all the good traits I want.
6) breed up tons of those drones, and use stacks of drones to create more princesses as needed.
7) when I manage to find or cross-breed to a new species I want, isolate the species serum, inoculate a super-strain drone and princess, and use them to breed up more stacks of the new species (that will have my doctored-up super stats)
8) profit???
1) collect a bunch of bees.
2) breed bees within their breed in order to get stacks of drones
3) use those stacks of drones to cross-breed with other species, aiming in particular for imperial and industrious for making new machines and such.
4) once getting some breeds with desirable traits, use the isolator to get a serum of those traits.
5) increase the quality of the serum and inoculate a target princess and drone with all the good traits I want.
6) breed up tons of those drones, and use stacks of drones to create more princesses as needed.
7) when I manage to find or cross-breed to a new species I want, isolate the species serum, inoculate a super-strain drone and princess, and use them to breed up more stacks of the new species (that will have my doctored-up super stats)
8) profit???
Note that some breeds only produce one drone, meaning you can breed them as many times as you like with no gain. Pay attention to these and put them aside at the start.
In particular, make sure the quality cannot be increased further. The purifier will specifically refuse to do any more work on the serum at this point.
Assuming you don't mean "convert", bear in mind you can't really "create" "more" princesses (you can go out and harvest them, but that's it) - each princess produces exactly one more princess, so your collection won't expand. Swarmer princesses are the exception but being temporary I've not seen a point to them (they can accelerate drone production, but the effort doesn't seem worth the reward).
Sometimes you'll have trouble producing enough drones to ensure isolation of the new race. If you can at least get a hybrid princess and drone, it's often worth inoculating them with maximum fertility and having them create a bunch more drones before isolating.
Bear in mind that the "shortest" lifespan trait, while common as mud and seemingly rubbish for resource production (though it honestly makes little difference), is also essential for getting any breeding done quickly.
With these points in mind, your checklist sums up efficient bee-breeding pretty well.
I'm in complete shock that I've managed to grasp all of this. I suppose that sitting down with the wiki(s), this forum, and a bee laboratory in a creative world has helped a lot, but bees are freakin' HARD.
Another couple questions before I run off to try to put my plan into action - with lifespan, shortest is obviously best for breeding, but will "longest" actually be good for getting product? I'd assume that it means less fiddling with the bees if I'm doing everything manually, but if I've got an alveary/apiary set up with pipes to keep feeding the princess back in over and over as well as some pipes to pull out the products, I suppose there's little net gain? In fact, I'd end up with fewer drones, right? So just ...shortest lifespan all the time, every time?
Another couple questions before I run off to try to put my plan into action - with lifespan, shortest is obviously best for breeding, but will "longest" actually be good for getting product? I'd assume that it means less fiddling with the bees if I'm doing everything manually, but if I've got an alveary/apiary set up with pipes to keep feeding the princess back in over and over as well as some pipes to pull out the products, I suppose there's little net gain? In fact, I'd end up with fewer drones, right? So just ...shortest lifespan all the time, every time?
Correct. "Longest" gets you far less drones, but because your bees spend less time being cycled in/out of hives they're spending more time producing... though in the short term the extra resources are negligible, as it's a very low percentage of an increase for any decent automated setup.
Bees may produce resources randomly whenever they tick, so if you had a bee that lived twice as long as another, one of the former's lifespans would produce exactly double that of the latter's on average (putting aside all other factors).
That said, there'll quickly come a time when you don't care about getting extra drones of a given species. At that point increasing lifespan doesn't hurt (because why not?), but there's certainly no point in prioritising it.
Another tip or two: When you get a new species of bee, it'll come with both positive and negative traits specific to that species. Pay attention to the bee databank to make sure you're not missing anything you want to isolate, as you might accidentally replace those traits with those of the parents before realising they were "up for grabs".
Identical drones stack, and stacked drones can be bee-alysed with a single drop of honey. This becomes useful once you start using the gene pool machine.
Imperial and industrious bees produce resources needed to make alveries, but they don't produce wax (which you'll also need loads of). Imperial bees are a great source of honey drops, though: they produce two types, both of which work in the beealyser.
Bees may produce resources randomly whenever they tick, so if you had a bee that lived twice as long as another, one of the former's lifespans would produce exactly double that of the latter's on average (putting aside all other factors).
That said, there'll quickly come a time when you don't care about getting extra drones of a given species. At that point increasing lifespan doesn't hurt (because why not?), but there's certainly no point in prioritising it.
Another tip or two: When you get a new species of bee, it'll come with both positive and negative traits specific to that species. Pay attention to the bee databank to make sure you're not missing anything you want to isolate, as you might accidentally replace those traits with those of the parents before realising they were "up for grabs".
Identical drones stack, and stacked drones can be bee-alysed with a single drop of honey. This becomes useful once you start using the gene pool machine.
Imperial and industrious bees produce resources needed to make alveries, but they don't produce wax (which you'll also need loads of). Imperial bees are a great source of honey drops, though: they produce two types, both of which work in the beealyser.
I always use 2 bee types in my world, one bee type is the superbee, which is used for getting resources, it's best to keep this bee with a fertility rate of 1 and a long lifespan, to make it easier to automate the process. the second bee is used to get as many drones as possible, so with a high fertility rate and a short lifespan, with all the drones you'll be getting you can turn them all into liquid DNA to run all your machines with
I've noticed that sometimes I'll have two sorta half-stacks of drones that appear to be 100% identical when put through the Beelyzer, but they won't clump together...is this a bug, or are there hidden genetic features or something that I'm not aware of? Any way to make these bad boys stack up?
It happens sometimes, no one's really sure why. Sometimes they randomly decide to stack later down the track (like a real day or so later), sometimes they don't.
They're drones: don't worry too much about them. You should be prepared to throw the vast majority into the gene pool to get rid of them anyway. Once I hit the point where you've got more spare DNA then you're using, I started putting them in recyclers, then finally just throwing them on the ground.
There used to be a way to make drones of any type stack, even if their traits didn't match (allowing you to instantly "convert" drones of one type to another). It's been like half a year since I've messed with bees though, so odds are that's been patched.
They're drones: don't worry too much about them. You should be prepared to throw the vast majority into the gene pool to get rid of them anyway. Once I hit the point where you've got more spare DNA then you're using, I started putting them in recyclers, then finally just throwing them on the ground.
There used to be a way to make drones of any type stack, even if their traits didn't match (allowing you to instantly "convert" drones of one type to another). It's been like half a year since I've messed with bees though, so odds are that's been patched.