Unleashed 1.1.3: Controlling bee pollination area

[SmokeLuvr1971]

Is there no other method to controlling a bee's pollination area than to deforest the surrounding land of vanilla/breedable trees?

On a heavily-developed world, I decided to finally start tree-breeding for the decorative woods [really only thing left to do]. This is after establishing a chestnut-driven seed oil factory and having 30+ alvearies for various bee products [I've been seeing butterflies around for a while now]

I ran across the thread which describes tree-breeding using butterflies and requires an enclosed structure [to keep the butterflies trapped]. I also read about the alveary sieve block and my plan was to combine the 2 methods.

So's I built the enclosure around a 9-chunk square and threw some alvearies in the middle. Before planting any trees inside, I decided to test the bees and see if they'd bring in any pollen from outside the enclosure. And sure enough they did.

Right now, my bees have max territory, so I can reduce that somewhat to try and stop them from bringing in outside pollen, but that will also reduce the area in which I can plant inside the enclosure [which may not be a bad thing in retrospect].

Also the reason I mentioned seeing butterflies earlier is because there may be a cap on the amount of butterflies in an area. I've had my enclosure populated with treealyzed Silver Lime + Birch trees for multiple MC days and have yet to see a single butterfly spawn within the enclosure. I am using Wrathlamps for lighting, but they're on the ground and butterflies spawn on leaves so the lamps shouldn't be interfering.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Edit: just after posting, I saw my first butterfly spawn inside the enclosure [figures] and I finally sat down, did the maths, and counted out the blocks from an alveary to the enclosure perimeter. With a 9-chunk enclosure, alvearies placed in the middle symmetrically and a default area, I end up with a 27x27 area centered on the alveary [9x9 trippled]. The enclosure perimeter is 22-blocks distant from the center, so I need to clear an additional 5-block space around the outside. While my bees are cooking, I'll do this and then test again.

 

[Niels Henriksen]

The bees can go through walls - so you need to either use a HUGE area or change the traits of the bees max territory.

 

[Yusunoha]

The bees can go through walls - so you need to either use a HUGE area or change the traits of the bees max territory.

it'd be really nice if Sengir ever changed it so the bee particles/effects wouldn't go through walls anymore. people would then be able to use their bees closer to their base without having to worry of everything getting bee'd up

 

[twisto51]

The tools are there to make the changes yourself. If you don't like the pollination effects change the range or type of pollination. Considering how many Rocky bees most players should have laying around getting their pollination type shouldn't be difficult.

If you want to do your tree crossbreeding in the middle of a forest of other trees for some reason then I recommend you use sieves in your alveries which will allow you to manually apply pollen X to tree Y.

I tend to avoid the issue by doing my tree breeding on raised platforms, making it trivial to isolate the trees and bees I'm working with.

The last thing I want is for bee effects to not go through walls, considering one of my first bee projects is to get the Explorer trait on bees near my main work area for the easy EXP farm. I suspect it would increase the server "load" of bees significantly to attempt such calculations.

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

The tools are there to make the changes yourself. If you don't like the pollination effects change the range or type of pollination. Considering how many Rocky bees most players should have laying around getting their pollination type shouldn't be difficult.

If you want to do your tree crossbreeding in the middle of a forest of other trees for some reason then I recommend you use sieves in your alveries which will allow you to manually apply pollen X to tree Y.

I tend to avoid the issue by doing my tree breeding on raised platforms, making it trivial to isolate the trees and bees I'm working with.

The last thing I want is for bee effects to not go through walls, considering one of my first bee projects is to get the Explorer trait on bees near my main work area for the easy EXP farm. I suspect it would increase the server "load" of bees significantly to attempt such calculations.

Am I missing something? I'm not talking about bee effects in this post, I'm talking about pollination range, specifically controlling tree-breeding pollination from bees...not flower production. Unless my maths are off, the absolute smallest area you can confine the bees to is 27x27 [default area of 9x9, tripled due to apiary/alveary use to keep bees pollinating 24/7 through automation]. So, as far as tools to control pollination range, we have 2. Use either apiary/alveary for 24/7 pollination at triple the bee's territory, or use bee houses with no bonus to pollination range [and no automation so no 24/7 pollination].

As for using sieves, yes they are in the my plan but they can't be automated, and the pollen doesn't stack in the sieve [to my knowledge]. So what happens when all sieves are full? I suspect the bees continue to pollinate but this will be hard to test with butterfly spawns.

The enclosure of the trees indicates that I'm relying mainly on butterflies for pollination...bees are supplemental which is why I seek to reign them in, and why I plan to use sieves...but sieves require alvearies and alvearies triple pollination range.

Interesting that you use platforms to exploit the height variable in pollination, but I don't think that method would be visually pretty [which is always of some concern].

 

[twisto51]

Interesting that you use platforms to exploit the height variable in pollination, but I don't think that method would be visually pretty [which is always of some concern].

You can make just about anything look good if you try hard enough. The floating platform for the portal to the promised land is a good template to start with.

I typically don't try to make tree pollination look good because it is something I do for less than a week to get the trees I want and then I just tear down the platforms. I use bee houses because of the bonus to pollination. I don't need automation because one cycle in a row of bee houses is usually enough to get the saplings I need. The really big trees(in terms of saplings required to plant a new tree) might take multiple runs.

On top of that unless you've found a way to automate the grafting process you have to show up to do the grafting by hand, no big deal to move a few princesses.