Like many, I’ve rediscovered the joys of Minecraft, especially playing alongside my daughter. To enhance our private server experience, I dove into modding, incorporating fantastic additions like Immersive Engineering, Tinker’s Construct, Beyond Earth, and Productive Bees. This last one, Productive Bees, really caught my attention – a beekeeping mod brimming with diverse bees that yield a wealth of resources.
However, a common hurdle with Minecraft mods is the often sparse out-of-game documentation. Guides are frequently outdated or simply nonexistent, leaving players to rely on fragmented YouTube videos or in-game resources. While in-game documentation via Patchouli has improved and Discord communities are incredibly helpful, I still often yearn for a comprehensive offline manual.
Thus, this guide is born: a concise introduction to Productive Bees. I’ve personally found it incredibly engaging, yet it presented a steeper learning curve than anticipated, even with the official wiki. Consider this your starting point for mastering productive beekeeping in Minecraft.
(Note: This guide assumes you have a foundational understanding of modded Minecraft. No prior beekeeping knowledge, even vanilla Minecraft beekeeping, is needed.)
Getting Started with Productive Bees: Prerequisites and Overview
Before diving into the world of productive bees, ensure you have these essential mods installed alongside Productive Bees:
- Just Enough Items (JEI): Absolutely crucial for discovering recipes, bee information, and resource uses within the mod.
- Jade (Just Another Dimensional Editor): Provides helpful in-game tooltips revealing information about blocks, bees, and nests, making it easier to understand bee attraction and production.
While Productive Bees may load without these, they are indispensable for truly grasping and utilizing the mod’s features effectively.
Productive Bees: Core Mechanics at a Glance
The Productive Bees mod revolves around a few key steps:
- Vanilla Foundation: Begin by harvesting honey and honeycomb from naturally occurring vanilla bee nests.
- Crafting Essential Gear: Utilize vanilla resources to create Bee Cages, Honey Treats, and Advanced Hives – your foundational beekeeping tools.
- Bee Acquisition: Capture wild bees using Bee Cages or lure specific species using Honey Treats and specialized nests.
- Advanced Hives and Resource Production: House your bees in Advanced Beehives, provide them with floral resources, and they’ll produce unique and valuable honeycombs.
- Bee Breeding and Expansion: Breed existing bee species or offer them special foods to cultivate entirely new and productive bee varieties.
Unlocking Bee Secrets with JEI
JEI is your ultimate encyclopedia for Productive Bees. Almost everything bee-related can be explored through JEI. A simple search for “bee” will reveal the vast array of bees the mod offers.
- Left-Clicking Bees in JEI: Uncover the bee’s origins – preferred nest types, breeding combinations, or specific generation methods.
- Right-Clicking Bees in JEI: Delve into a bee’s capabilities – dietary needs, produced resources, block interactions (destruction or alteration), and potential offspring through breeding. Often, you’ll find an “info” tab (🛈) with general bee lore and details.
This interactive JEI integration extends beyond bees. Left-clicking nests reveals crafting recipes, while right-clicking unveils biome compatibility and bee attraction details. If you’re familiar with JEI, these actions correspond to the “recipe for” and “uses of” views, providing a wealth of information at your fingertips.
Gathering Your First Resources: Honey and Honeycomb
Your beekeeping journey starts with vanilla Minecraft bees. Wild bee nests naturally generate on trees in the world. If you’re struggling to locate them, birch and oak saplings have a chance to grow into trees with attached beehives when planted near flowers (approximately a 5% chance per tree). Planting a grove of saplings with nearby flowers and waiting for growth is a reliable method to encourage beehive generation.
Once a nest is visibly dripping honey, it’s ready for harvest. Use a glass bottle to collect honey or shears to gather honeycomb. Crucially, harvesting without smoke will anger the bees! Be prepared to either fight off the swarm or, preferably, use smoke from a campfire or smoker to pacify them temporarily. Smoke calms the bees, preventing them from becoming hostile and allowing for repeated harvests from the same nest. Remember, angry bees won’t produce more honey.
Crafting Your Initial Beekeeping Equipment
With honey and honeycomb in hand, you can craft the essential starting equipment. Refer to JEI for precise recipes, but these are the key items to prioritize:
- Honey Treats: Crafted from honey and honeycomb. These are used to lure bees to nests and for bee breeding.
- Advanced Hives: Made with honeycomb, planks, shears, and campfires. These are the upgraded hives needed to house productive bees and harvest their special honeycombs.
- Bee Cages: Crafted using honey and planks. Used to capture wild bees and transport them to your apiary.
- Productive Bees Manual: Combine a Bee Cage and a Book to create an in-game guide book, offering another source of information within Minecraft itself.
Keep an eye out for villages! They sometimes contain Sturdy Bee Cages as loot. These are non-stackable but reusable, offering a durable alternative to crafted Bee Cages. If you find some, you can reduce your initial crafting needs, though you’ll still need to craft at least one regular Bee Cage for the manual.
Acquiring Bees: Catching and Luring Techniques
Expanding your bee collection involves two primary methods: capturing wild bees and luring specific species to your apiary.
Capturing Wild Bees with Bee Cages
The simplest way to acquire new bees is by directly capturing them in the wild using Bee Cages. Equip a Bee Cage and use it on a wild bee – this works for vanilla bees and several mod-added species like Mason Bees and Carpenter Bees. Congratulations, you’ve safely caged a bee!
To release a caged bee, simply right-click while holding the cage. For controlled relocation, shift-right-click a hive or nest with a caged bee. If the bee is compatible with that housing type, it will designate it as its new home.
Luring Bees with Nests and Honey Treats: A Step-by-Step Guide
Many unique and productive bee species either don’t spawn naturally or are more easily obtained through luring. This involves using specific nests and Honey Treats to attract desired bees.
Here’s the luring process broken down:
- JEI Research: Consult JEI to determine the preferred nest type and biome for the bee species you wish to attract.
- Nest Construction: Craft the specified nest type.
- Biome Placement: Place the nest in the correct biome as indicated by JEI.
- Jade Verification: Double-check with Jade. It should indicate that the nest “can attract bees in this location.” If not, adjust the biome or nest type.
- Enclosure Construction (Crucial): Build a small enclosure around the nest. Bees appear directly in front of the nest upon arrival and are prone to wandering off without an enclosure. A simple 3x3x3 space is sufficient.
- Honey Treat Application: Right-click the nest with a Honey Treat.
- Patience: Wait. Jade will display a timer indicating the bee’s arrival time. Using additional Honey Treats can accelerate this process.
Once the timer expires and the bee appears within the enclosure, you can break the nest block. The bee will remain safely contained within the broken nest block, allowing you to transport it.
Multiplayer Note: In multiplayer environments, a client-server synchronization issue might occur where Jade incorrectly indicates an empty nest after the timer. If this happens, pick up the nest block anyway – a bee is likely inside despite Jade’s display.
Managing Annoying Bee Species: ZomBees, Skeletal Bees, and Nomad Bees
Some bees present unique acquisition challenges:
- ZomBees and Skeletal Bees: These cannot be lured directly. Instead, they spawn randomly in dark, unoccupied hives. The best approach is to create a few hives in a secluded, dark cave and periodically check them for these spooky bees.
- Nomad Bees: Nomad Bees are notorious for usurping nests intended for solitary bee species. Fortunately, this takeover isn’t infinite. Consistent removal and relocation of Nomad Bees away from your primary apiary will eventually mitigate the problem. However, retain a couple of Nomad Bees for breeding purposes, as they can be valuable for certain bee lineages.
Bee Care and Management: Creating a Thriving Apiary
Once you’ve amassed a collection of bees, providing suitable housing and care is paramount. Bees in Productive Bees fall into two categories:
- Solitary Bees: Require individual nests. They don’t produce resources themselves but are essential for breeding and expanding your bee diversity.
- Gregarious Bees: Need beehives (specifically Advanced Hives). These are the resource producers, yielding valuable honeycombs and honey.
Regardless of bee type, enclosure is key!
Building Bee Enclosures: Safety and Containment
Minecraft bees are not as adept at navigation as their real-world counterparts. They easily get lost and despawn if allowed to roam freely. Enclose your entire beekeeping area, including a roof, to prevent bee loss. Ideally, subdivide the apiary into smaller, individual cubicles for each hive or nest. A 3x3x3 interior space is a good starting point for each hive cubicle.
Use solid blocks like glass blocks for enclosure construction, rather than partial blocks like glass panes. Bees can sometimes become stuck on partially solid blocks, disrupting their behavior.
Finally, place the appropriate nest or beehive within the enclosure. If bees aren’t already housed, release them nearby. If you plan for automated resource collection, position hives to allow easy connection of pipes, cables, or conveyors for honeycomb and honey extraction.
Resource Production: Harvesting Honeycomb and Bee Products
Productive Bees truly shine in resource generation. Bees housed in Advanced Beehives diligently produce honeycombs when provided with appropriate food sources.
Honeycomb Production and Food Requirements
To understand a bee’s food requirements for honeycomb production, right-click the bee in JEI and consult the “flowering” tab. Most bees require flowers or blocks related to the resource they produce. For example, Iron Bees need iron ore or iron blocks as “flowers.”
Throughout the Minecraft day-night cycle, bees will emerge from their hives. If suitable food is within range, they will gather from it and return to the hive, generating resource-specific honeycombs.
Harvesting Honeycomb and Honey: Manual and Automated Extraction
Honeycombs can be manually extracted from hives by right-clicking. For automated collection, utilize piping systems to extract honeycombs directly from the hive.
Small quantities of honey are also produced within the hive itself. Extract this honey by placing glass bottles into the hive. This is worthwhile even if you have automated honey production from centrifuging, as each bottle of honey extraction yields a plain honeycomb as a byproduct, which are essential for crafting more beehives and hive expansions.
Centrifuging Honeycomb: Unlocking Valuable Resources
Honeycomb harvested from Advanced Hives isn’t directly usable in most cases. It needs to be processed in a Centrifuge to unlock its valuable components. Centrifuging yields:
- Wax: A common byproduct used in various crafting recipes.
- Liquid Honey: An additional source of honey, useful for crafting and other recipes.
- Bee-Specific Resources: This is where the magic happens! Centrifuging produces resources unique to each bee type, such as redstone dust, raw iron, wood chips, and many more, providing a renewable source of valuable materials.
Advanced Bee Mechanics: Block Conversion, Breeding, and Metamorphosis
Productive Bees offers deeper mechanics for advanced players, including block conversion, bee breeding, and metamorphosis.
Block Conversion: Environmental Interactions
Some bee species possess a “block conversion” ability, viewable in JEI by right-clicking the bee and checking the relevant tab. These bees can transform certain blocks in the environment into other blocks. For instance, Magmatic Bees convert cobblestone into lava source blocks.
Be mindful of this ability when designing your apiary enclosure. Avoid using blocks that bees might transform unintentionally. Conversely, block conversion can be strategically harnessed. The cobblestone to lava conversion, when paired with appropriate infrastructure for placing and harvesting cobblestone and lava, provides a slow but infinite lava source.
For effective block conversion farms, position conversion blocks at the same height level as the bee’s food source. If placed at different heights, bees may prioritize one over the other, reducing efficiency.
Bee Breeding and Metamorphosis: Expanding Bee Diversity
Many advanced bee species are not found in the wild and must be created through crossbreeding or metamorphosis. JEI provides breeding information for each bee species.
- Breeding: To breed bees, enclose two parent bees (captured in Bee Cages) together. Right-click each parent bee with the breeding food specified in JEI (often flowers, but not always the same food used for honeycomb production!). Wait briefly, and a baby bee will appear.
- Metamorphosis: Some bees require metamorphosis. For these, obtain the first-stage bee (often through breeding or as a base form) and right-click it with the resource required to trigger metamorphosis. This resource is also detailed in JEI.
Genetic Engineering: The Next Frontier (Brief Overview)
Productive Bees also features genetic engineering, allowing for complex bee manipulation and the creation of bees that are exclusively obtainable through this method. However, genetic engineering is an advanced mechanic beyond the scope of this beginner’s guide. Explore in-game documentation and further resources to delve into this complex but powerful system.
Conclusion: Embrace Productive Beekeeping!
Productive Bees adds a fascinating and rewarding layer to Minecraft modded gameplay. From humble beginnings with vanilla bees to complex apiaries producing valuable resources and unique bee species, the mod offers a rich and engaging experience.
This guide provides a solid foundation for your beekeeping journey. Experiment, explore JEI, and most importantly, have fun discovering the incredible world of Productive Bees! Happy modding and may your hives be ever productive!
External Links:
