Bee Breeding Guide

= 1 Introduction =

Bees are a powerful way of generating resources in Gregtech: New Horizons.

Bee breeding and bee keeping are deep, complex systems spanning many mods.

Both the the resource types you get from bees and the tools available to get the most out of them scale as you progress through the pack.

This means you can start bees at any time, and it will get easier the more tech and magic progression you have, but the resources available from bees are useful starting from pretty early on.

Most basic ores, from copper, tin, and iron to naquadah, tungsten, and titanium have bees.

Even some ultra late game resources such as neutronium and infinity have bees.

Extracting useful materials from higher tier bees will require higher tier materials and power.

For example, Xenon combs need an IV fluid extractor, and Osmium combs need an IV chemical reactor with phthalic acid and some of the osmium related parts of the platinum line to process. On the other hand, Iron combs just need to be centrifuged.

If you like passive resource generation or minmax-able systems with tons of numbers, you'll probably enjoy bees.

The amount of time required to get every bee is quite high, even with good tools and knowledge. Fortunately, most of the work can be done in the background, and bees do not require constant attention like crops.

If you want a real challenge, you could even try automating large parts of the breeding process with opencomputers!

Just getting to the alveary, a critical beekeeping tool that greatly increases production and eases breeding, can be done in under ten hours once you know what to do.

This is a long and in depth guide to forestry bees with as little nonsense as possible. I will attempt to give step by step progression info on various processes including breeding up to the alveary, breeding after the alveary, and "duplicating" bees. I will also offer some numbers for how fast different bee setups will work. This guide was primarily written and researched by hacatu#3606 in the discord, with help from Rosenlied#3858.

1.1 Prerequisites
To get started, you will need several things. I recommend being in late LV, but some of the more advanced things require early HV. Each of these will be explored in more detail in sections 2 and 3.

1.1.1 Bee Gathering Tools

 * 1) Many basic scoops, or an unbreakable scoop such as
 * 2) * Scooporator mx200 turbo (late MV)
 * 3) * Manasteel scoop (late MV)
 * 4) * Void scoop (mid LV): If you don't want to do a lot of warping research, void ingots and void swords very rarely come from Twilight Lich Tower chests and crimson cultists respectively.
 * 5) * Wand focus: excavation (mid LV): if you want to use a wand focus, equal trade is more useful outside of gathering hives.
 * 6) * Wand focus: equal trade (mid LV)
 * 7) * quarries such as arcane bores (late MV) or the ender quarry (early LuV)
 * 8) Chests, Diamond Chests, Apiarist Chests, Filing Cabinets, Drawers, etc to hold all of your bees and bee products.
 * 9) * Only identical drones can stack, princesses and queens can never stack even if they have the exact same traits.
 * 10) * Chests can hold 27 stacks (54 for a double chest), sky stone chests 36, iron 54, gold 81, diamond 108, apiarist 125, and compressed 300.
 * 11) * Apiarist Chests keep their contents on 5 separate pages.
 * 12) * Filing cabinets can hold 270 stacks, but you can only put one type of item in them. Fortunately, all drones are considered the same type of item, so this is a good choice.  Beware that these can be laggy and placing too many can corrupt your chunks.
 * 13) * Advanced filing cabinets can hold 540 stacks, but can only hold items that don't normally stack. Fortunately, this includes princesses.  Identical princesses will stack here, although even princesses with the same traits can be different due to having different number of generations in captivity and so on.
 * 14) * Drawers and Barrels are good for storing any comb or other product you produce a huge amount of.
 * 15) * Apiarist backpacks are good for storing bees you gather while exploring, although the regular backpacks will do as well.

Hives will give you at least 1 princess and possibly some drones and combs. See. You want probably 10-20 pristine princesses before you get started.

Princesses can be either pristine or ignoble. Most hive types have a little under 70% chance to give an ignoble princess, but some always give pristine. Ignoble princesses will die after you use them for a long time so I don't really like them, but they have their place.

You will want many, many pristine princesses. Got a chest full? You'll eventually want more, although you don't need THAT many to get started. Besides exploring normally or buying hives, looking underwater for water hives is a very good way to get a lot of pristine bees if you run out. You can also fly around the end and pick up ender hives, or rocky hives while mining.

It's worth noting that while rocky and water hives always give pristine princesses, these species are fertility 1, which may be annoying in some applications.

Nether and Oblivion hives also always give pristine princesses, but they are harder to find.

If you don't have a scoop or inventory space when you find a hive, you might want to set a waypoint there.

Forestry hives emit light, so they are easy to spot at night if you aren't afraid of the monsters, or on JorneyMap night mode.

1.1.2 Beekeeping Tools

 * 1) Get a field kit and beealyzer.  The field kit is optional if you can afford the beealyzer, but definitely consider it before you have the alveary.  It saves a lot of honey.  Love yourself: don't use the gregtech scanner.  Also don't bother with the Apiarist Database: it is intended for base forestry where info bees is hidden until you discover it; nei provides all of the useful information more easily.
 * 2) Progress through thaumcraft enough to get a Thaumic Restorer.  This is optional when getting started, but once you get some more expensive frames it is basically required.  This can repair frames (besides GT++), the field kit (which can be used to cheese infinite paper), and many tools.  Another notable use only tangentially related to bees is repairing blood magic flight potions.  This can help find hives more easily, especially ender hives.  The flight potions can be made without any blood magic - just put a chicken trophy in an assembler, which you can in turn get as a reward from the botania soarlander if you don't fancy your luck killing chickens.
 * 3) Get some apiaries from villages, buy from questbook, or craft.  You really cannot get enough of these.
 * 4) Get ender io item conduits to automate apiaries.  Hoppers and gregtech item pipes or apiarist pipes are a couple other options.
 * 5) Get some good frames.
 * 6) * The oblivion frame is ridiculously helpful for breeding, but its crafting recipe is ridiculously harmful to the human psyche. You can get it from advanced bee loot bags or stronghold chests, and maybe other dungeon chests.  This isn't required, but it's one of the top two bee breeding tools along with the mutatron, and it's the most powerful way to reduce lifespan (get to the next generation faster)
 * 7) * Chocolate, restraint, soul, and necrotic frames reduce lifespan
 * 8) * Soul and metabolic frames increase mutation chance
 * 9) * Metabolic and Necrotic frames are basically loot bag only
 * 10) * Chocolate, restraint, and soul can be crafted without bee breeding, and chocolate can even be bought in the questbook
 * 11) * GT++ frames CANNOT be repaired by the thaumic repairer, so only consider them if you are starting bees late and have a lot of resources. Most of them are outclassed by other frames, but there are a couple good ones.
 * See.
 * 1) Get an escritoire.  This block lets you play a minigame that gives two optional but very valuable benefits, especially pre-alveary
 * 2) * You get a research note for a random mutation of the species of drone you place in the center. You can only use a research note once per mutation, and it permanently boosts your chances of getting that mutation by 1.5x but only by up to 5 percentage points.
 * 3) * You get some products from the bee's list of products. This is a great way to increase comb yield early on.
 * The escritoire is discussed in more detail in the Alveary section
 * 1) Get a lot of seed oil.  You don't need this to start bees, but seed oil is needed in MASSIVE quantities for the alveary, so set up some kind of farm as early as you can.  The alveary takes 64800 mb.
 * 2) * Pam's sesame seeds/peanuts are the easiest way to get seed oil in the necessary quantities. They don't require any ic2 crop or forestry tree breeding, and they give more seed oil than most basic seeds.  To automate them, an ender io farming station, unbreakable mattock (search the questbook for the "animal farms" quest and complete it to get one for free), and openblocks sprinklers work well.  Each one gives 36 mb seed oil, so you need 1800.
 * 3) * Pam's pistachio/cashew/cherry/walnut/pecan/almond give 45 mb each so you would only need 144. However, these literally grow on trees, which despite the idiom is a bad thing for Pam's harvestcraft foods since they are slower and harder to automate
 * 4) * IC2 rape crop. This will require you to get into ic2 crop breeding.  It gives 125 mb each so you would only need 480, but each plant is slow growing especially with bad stats and they are tedious to duplicate.  If you plan to use this for biodiesel then this is an option, but it is not worth setting up just for bees.
 * 5) * Nutdew give 200 mb each. These come from "Farmed" bees, which will require 3 extra breeding steps pre-alveary if you decide to go this route.  324 seedy combs are needed to get the nutdew necessary.
 * 6) * Extra Trees Coconuts give 300 mb each, so only 216 are needed, but these require tree breeding. I don't know anything about tree breeding so I can't recommend this option.
 * Look at the Alveary section for a thorough breakdown of its costs, especially if you want to use Farmed bees.

= 2 Bee overview =

2.1 Hive Bees/Breeding only
There are 461 species of bee in the pack. Some of them cannot be obtained, generally because they have been replaced by a greggified version, and about 21 kinds only come from hives/loot chests/villager trading. These are typically called "hive bees" or "wild bees". You can buy them or their hives in the questbook for coins. The rest of the bees you will have to breed for.

All bee species that are available from hives should be listed in the Appendix: Hive Spawning and Drops.

There are three special bee species that come from in world sources rather than breeding besides those:
 * 1) Valiant bees have about a 1-3% chance of dropping from most hives instead of the default species.  The chance is effectively a bit higher for princesses because there's almost no chance of not getting a princess.  This is the only way to get Valiant bees.
 * 2) Steadfast come from various loot chests, some bee loot bags, the questbook coin shop, or a couple rarer types of hives in leu of Valiant (Infernal and Oblivion).  If you can't find any Steadfast bees, consider buying the Infernal and Oblivion hives a couple times before buying the Steadfast drone.  They have a way lower chance of giving a Steadfast bee than just buying the drone, but they cost half as many coins and have a 50% and 100% chance to give pristine princesses respectively.  Bee coins are renewable thanks to the "Hey is that a friendly bumblebee" quest (kill 10 wasps), so don't worry too much.
 * 3) Monastic can be bought from villagers or the questbook.  The coin quest is pretty cheap.

2.2 Bee behavior
To use bees, put a princess and drone in any bee housing (bee house, apiary, magic apiary, alveary, industrial apiary, or the giant hive multiblock in new versions). They will combine to form a queen, which will work in the housing for some number of bee ticks and then produce offspring.

The queen will have the exact same primary and secondary stats as the princess, but when she produces offspring they will also inherit traits from the drone or even have a mutation. This is explained in and.

In addition to princesses, drones, and queens, there are larvae (singular larva) which are only used in the genetics mod. These can only be made in the alveary, see.

These numbers are for comparison only. Calculations assume 2.2.10 (ie nerfed production formula but with fixed second rolls on primary products), assumes combs are a primary product, bees have blinding production speed, and no world acceleration is used.

The first number for each production column is combs/hour with no upgrades, the second number is max production upgrades.

For Apiaries, max production upgrades is considered 8x production (not using GT++ frames).

For Alvearies, the numbers are with 15.625x and 16x production instead.

Industrial Apiary production upgrades are currently worthless, increasing production per hour by less than 1, this is a bug. The intended numbers (based on the tooltip of the gendustry production upgrade) are probably 66.4-69.0 and 217.3-220.7.

Apiaries, Magic Apiaries, and Industrial Apiaries can be World Accelerated.

2.2.1 Doing work
Every bee tick (27.5 seconds), the queen has a chance to produce the various products on her list. If the queen cannot tolerate the current environment (climate, time of day, weather, surrounding flowers, blocks above housing, etc), she will not do anything that bee tick, not even tick down her lifetime. See for how to determine if a bee can tolerate an environment.

The queen also runs her effect continuously. Some effects are helpful, most are annoying or useless.

Helpful effects include
 * Empowering, which adds random aspects to nearby thaumcraft nodes
 * Magnifying, which increases nodes from fading to pale to normal to bright
 * Beatific, which heals players in range
 * Explorer, which gives players in range XP

Harmful ones include
 * Poisonous, which poisons living creatures in range
 * Ends, which deals large amounts of damage to creatures in range
 * Radioact., which deals large amounts of damage and breaks blocks

See for a full list.

If you wear an apiarist's suit (or ender io armor with apiarist upgrades) you will be immune to all bee effects, positive and negative, although they will still affect any other players or creatures they normally would. High tier armors like quantum/primordial/draconic/bound also let you effectively ignore most bee effects.

Finally, the queen will pollinate trees and spread flowers, depending on her preferred flower type. The complete list of flower types is in the.

Only forestry and extra trees trees are pollinated, but pollination is undesirable outside of tree breeding because checking for the trees is a small source of lag.

If trees to pollinate are actually found, this process will also spam butterflies, so a pest killer is highly recommended in case you decide to do that. Tree/butterfly breeding is outside of the scope of this guide.

In order to make any products in the second row, her "specialty" products, her jubilance condition NEEDS to be met. This means that both the primary and (in the case of a hybrid queen) secondary species must be in their preferred climate, and any other conditions of each species must be met.

Remember, the queen's traits are exactly the same as the princess: the drone's traits don't factor in until creating offspring. (Notice that this means some hybrids cannot be jubilant, but you only encounter hybrids while breeding unless you are doing mad science.) Some (irrelevant) species require there to be no entities in range, and some require a particular block under their housing or can only be jubilant in the mega apiary.

2.2.2 Producing Offspring: basics
Once the queen's lifespan is over, she will produce 0-1 princesses and 1-4 drones. Pristine always make a princess though, so if you love yourself and don't use ignoble bees you can ignore the chance to not get a princess.

If you have a large stack of drones (or even just 7-10 a lot of the time), you can breed them repeatedly with a princess to turn it into a genetic copy of the drones.

2.2.3 Bee Traits
Each bee has a meager 15 traits. Each trait has a primary and secondary value ("allele"). Almost all traits are separately heritable.

Preferred temperature and humidity are the exceptions: these depend on the species and cannot be changed. The appearance, including name, and produce are also tied to the species. For every other trait (including species itself), they arise in one of three ways:


 * 1) For bees you get from hives, chests, villagers, questbook, hivecynth, etc, all of their alleles in all of their traits are set to the default value.
 * 2) * However, some bees from hives/hivecynth have a chance to be tolerant flyers, see and Botanical Bees.
 * 3) When you breed a princess with a drone, the offspring bees (princess and all drones) have one allele in each trait randomly taken from each parent.  For example, if you breed Forest-Meadows with Meadows-Meadows, each offspring will be either Forest-Meadows or Meadows-Meadows (or Meadows-Forest since order is random too).
 * 4) Finally, if a mutation happens, one or both of the parents is replaced with a default bee of the mutated species.
 * 5) * The chance and conditions (if any) can be seen in nei. There are two relevant nei pages: the "bee breeding tree", and "bee breeding".
 * 6) ** "Bee breeding tree" is good if you want to get an overview of all the steps needed to get a species
 * 7) ** "Bee breeding" should be preferred though because it is easier to see special requirements, and it does a better job listing all possible mutations that result in a given bee when there are multiple.
 * 8) * Each offspring is calculated independently, meaning in particular that each one has a separate opportunity to get a mutation.

You can find all the bees that have some trait or all the possible values for a trait by looking at the gendustry gene samples in nei. For example, to see all production speeds, search "production:", and to see all bees that give blinding, look at recipes for the gene for blinding.

You can also see most of the traits for a species in its shift tooltip in nei, and all of them by looking at its uses in the gendustry genetic extractor nei page.

Some methods directly modify an existing bee/larva's stats, but (besides the creative only imprinter) these are not from forestry and are explained in their own section, mainly Genetics and Gendustry. If both slots for a trait are the same, we say it is "homogeneous" or "purebred", otherwise, we say it is "heterogeneous" or "hybrid". Heterogeneous traits are bad because identical drones stack but every heterogeneous trait increases the number of possible offspring drones. Heterogeneous traits also mean that dominant/recessive traits affect how the bee will actually behave with respect to that trait.

Dominant/recessive traits will sometimes make breeding slightly harder, because a bee with one good allele and one bad allele in a trait might exhibit the behavior of the bad allele with probability 100% rather than 50% or 0% if it is dominant and the good allele is recessive. For the sake of truly staggering completeness, recessive alleles show in blue in the beealyzer and dominant alleles in red. If both are dominant or both are recessive, the first is used. For breeding, Fertility is the most important since additional drones make breeding exponentially easier. Each addtional offspring produced is another chance to get the offspring you want. With a fertility of 1, you have two chances (princess and drone) to get the offspring you want. With a fertility of 4, you have five chances.

Another way of looking at this is that with a higher fertility, there is a lower chance that none of the offspring will have some trait you want that is only in one of the parent slots.

For example, breeding Meadows-Common with Meadows-Forest has a 1/4 chance of not passing Common down to any offspring if the princess has fertility 1, but only a 1/32 chance if her fertility is 4.

Temperature/Humidity tolerance can also be nice for breeding, although you can usually work around them with alveary climate control or by changing biomes. The others largely don't matter for breeding.

Lifespan is important if you don't have good frames/stimulators, since bees with longer lifespans take longer to produce offspring so you can move on to the next breeding cycle. That's why lifespan reducing frames like the oblivion frame are so good.

Once you get into production, the production speed trait is the most important, but don't worry about it too much for now.

You will have to breed many species of bees whose products you don't need to get to the useful ones, and you won't be able to get to bees that naturally have the best traits until later on. Fortunately, it's fairly easy to breed bees with a new species together with bees with good stats to get bees that have both. The post alveary section has more information on breeding for stats. You can also ignore breeding for stats almost entirely and use the genetics mod if you find the process tedious. Gendustry is even simpler but gated behind LuV and a lot of bee breeding.

All traits and their mechanics and values are listed in the Appendix: Traits.

2.2.3 Producing Offspring: in depth
When making each offspring, forestry does the following:


 * 1) For each parent (ie the original princess and drone that formed the queen), there is a 50% chance to look for a mutation between its primary species and the secondary species of the other parent, and a 50% chance to look for a mutation between its secondary species and the primary species of the other parent.
 * 2) * Notice that this means you cannot get a mutation between the primary species or the secondary species.
 * 3) * Forestry goes over all possible mutations for the pair of species selected
 * 4) *# For each such possible mutation, if its conditions are not met, go on to the next mutation
 * 5) *# If its conditions are met, find the adjusted probability, generate a random number between 0 and 1, and if the number is smaller than the adjusted probability, replace the current parent with the default bee for the mutated species.
 * 6) *# Otherwise, the mutation failed due to random chance. Continue to the next mutation.
 * 7) *# If none of the possible mutations succeeds (including when there aren't any possible mutations), don't replace the parent.
 * 8) * Repeat for the other parent.
 * 9) * Now we have two parents, each of which is either one of the original parents or a purebred mutation.
 * 10) * For each trait, pick a random allele from each parent and assign these as the alleles for this offspring in a random order.

Some notes on the mutation procedure:


 * Yes, this means it is impossible to get a mutation between the two primary species or the two secondary species of the parents. Mutations are only possible between one primary and one secondary species.  This probably is unintended,
 * If a mutation says it requires some kind of biome like a Forest Biome or a Nether Biome, it means it needs a biome with that tag, not that name. For example,  The Undergarden is a Nether biome.  For a list of biomes including tags, see [the biome sheet on the gtnh game data doc].  Note that this includes all biomes, even those which don't generate.
 * The list of mutations is not shuffled, so if more than one is possible, getting any besides the first is only possible if the first isn't guaranteed
 * The order of the species doesn't matter for mutations, eg Meadows + Forest or Forest + Meadows both have the same chance to mutate into Common.

2.3 Stone Age (and later) Bee Automation
Ender io item conduits with self feed enabled are my favorite way to automate apiaries. You can put one apiary on top and two on different sides of a single conduit, and then connect chests to the bottom and final two faces. Use a different conduit color for each apiary+chest pair, and set the chest to lower priority. If you're even less organized than me (unlikely), you can put apiaries on all five conduit sides besides the bottom and put a diamond chest on the bottom, but this has the drawback of mixing up where the drones and princesses go so it only works if you want five apiaries with the same species and already have almost five stacks of drones. Before you have conduits, the best approach is to put a sideways hopper under each apiary and connect a gregtech item pipe to it. Then bring the pipe up one block to connect to the apiary, and up a second block to connect to storage. Make sure that you don't put opaque blocks over the apiary or your bee will slack off; check it does not complain about not being able to see the sky. This is only a concern for bees that don't have the "Cave Dwelling" trait.

Yet another option is apiarist pipes. These have some nice bee filtering options that let you do slightly more advanced bee automation.

You should set up an automated apiary for every bee species you make until reaching the alveary and just let them run. It's only 8-12 species. Once you have the alveary you can stop the automation for the useless ones, and only set up automation for any species with remotely useful drops or interesting stats.

You should at least get 10-14 drones of each species you breed. This lets you easily take some drone and create a princesses with the same species and, if they have the same stats, with those too. You can't automate frames in apiaries unfortunately, but you can in frame housings in alvearies. Before that you can still create a timer or counter to trigger an alarm or stop your apiaries before the frames break if you want to repair them.

2.4 Beealyzer and Information
Similar to crops, bees don't show you most of their information until you scan them. Also similar to crops, there are several ways to do so and the gregtech scanner is the worst one. You should make the field kit, beealyzer, and thaumic restorer. You only really need the field kit OR beealyzer depending on your tech level, and the thaumic restorer is optional until you have expensive frames, but all three are useful so make sure you understand the tradeoffs.

The field kit lets you scan bees at the cost of paper and time. However, while the stack of paper in its gui is real and you can add or remove paper that way, it's simply tied to its durability so you can also just repair it in the thaumic restorer. This is a fun and cool way to cheese paper, since you can just pull paper out of the field kit, repair it, and then pull more paper out. The field kit will fully scan the bee, but only show its active traits. This is similar to the tooltip of a scanned bee, which shows some of its active traits (and also both of its species if it is a hybrid). That's where the beealyzer comes in. You can place a bee in the slot labeled "I" or "II" to see both its primary and secondary traits for everything. The III slot shows possible products of the bee, but once you know what species it is this information is already known (hybrids can produce any product from the primary species, and, in 2.2.10+ or the iapiary/mega apiary or for those with 100% base chance, primary products of the secondary species if there are any). The IV slot is for lore/flavortext.

You can also use the beealyzer to scan bees at the cost of (regular) honey drops or honeydew. However, if you are doing this pre-alveary, I recommend reviewing the cost of the alveary before considering this. It is instant and doesn't require switching inventories as much, so it's totally fair to just use it.

The gregtech scanner is mostly the worst of both worlds, with the added inconvenience of being immobile and not giving you infinite paper. It combines the slow scanning speed and failure to display inactive traits of the field kit with the honey sucking tendencies of the beealyzer. Its sole advantage is that it uses liquid honey instead of (regular) honey drops or honeydew, so it can use other kinds of honey including yellow tinted drops from the saffron bee. It will also fully scan the bee so the beealyzer can show advanced info without consuming more honey.

See for a list of traits, but for now you mainly care about species and fertility, so you only need to use the beealyzer to check the inactive speed trait, since if the active and inactive species trait differ, the scanned tooltip will show that as a hybrid.

= 3 Grinding to the Alveary =

What is this alveary and what is it good for?

In the table in section 2, you already saw that the alveary can hold way more upgrades than the apiary, makes combs much faster, has climate control, and many other advantages.

Its upgrades are much more varied than frames.

In the apiary, you can use up to 3 frames and that's it. Maybe a world accelerator.

This means you are forced to choose between high production, low lifetime, or high mutation chance.

With the alveary, you don't need to choose. You can easily minimize lifetime and maximize mutation chance at the same time, and still have upgrade slots left over to make the alveary simulate the ideal environment for your bees.

Thus it makes breeding easier because you can mutate faster and more reliably and have to move around less to chase the environment your bees need.

It also has a base production multiplier 10x higher than the apiary and can be boosted even higher quite easily. Production multipliers aren't actually linear anymore since the production nerf in 2.2.8, but it definitely produces a lot more stuff than a basic apiary.

Finally, the alveary is needed to get into the Genetics mod, and it offers a couple tools for dealing with the drawbacks of ignoble bees.

There's just one catch, its cost is extremely high. We'll go over how much it costs and how to best save up for it in section 3, and then explain all of its features in detail in section 4, so feel free to read that section first.

3.1 The Absolute Expense of the Alveary
The alveary is a decadently expensive multiblock. The main costs are 216 buckets of honey (108 in 2.2.8), 216 royal jelly, 216 pollen, and 32400 mb seed oil (900 peanuts). Unfortunately for you, hapless victim, apiaries have their production slashed by 10.

1x Frames means no frames, 8x means 3 frames that each give 2x. The times are given for 1 apiary, so if you have 3 apiaries it would only take 1/3rd as long.

DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THESE NUMBERS! 2.2.8 nerfed bees HARD. It's just the new formula increases production when the multiplier from housing/frames is under 4, and that's always the case in the apiary unless you use GT++ frames. 2.2.10 will fix a bug that caused reduced production when the production chance wasn't 100%, which is why its times are better than 2.2.8.

So in 2.2.3 you definitely want to use fastest bees and frames. If you don't repair the frames using the thaumic restorer, you'd go through about 39.7 untreated, 13.2 impregnated, or 4.4 proven. Remember you can buy them in the questbook. I haven't found a way to automatically insert frames, including robot arms. If you use proven, they last for 5.5 hours each (720 durability * 27.5 seconds per bee tick), so just check them every couple hours and repair them if they are low. In 2.2.8+ frames barely matter, and using fastest instead of faster doesn't matter as much as in 2.2.3. If you make 8 apiaries, divide the waiting time by 8. You can also world accelerate (WA) apiaries in 2.2.8+, but not 2.2.3. Technically this could be as much as 8x speed at HV, but it takes a tremendous amount of power. That's the waiting time to get royal jelly. Pollen is the same, but honey is even worse since you need 10 honey drops per bucket so you need 2160 honey drops if you're getting it that way. Mercifully, there are a couple other ways to get it.

Majestic bees have a 30% base chance to make dripping combs, worth 0.14 buckets of honey, but Saffron bees have a 75% base chance to make a honey comb worth 0.09 PLUS 25% to make a yellow tinted comb worth 0.28.
 * 1) SOME biomes o plenty wasp hives in the nether have honey in them. The wasps also give you beekeeper coins for killing them as a repeatable quest reward, but they might beat you up if you are weak.
 * 2) You get a few combs from breaking hives in world, but not that many.
 * 3) The escritoire can crank out combs as fast as you can play its little memory game, at the cost of a decent number of drones.
 * 4) Finally, tinted honey drops give 2x the honey when melted so you can breed saffron bees.

All of these times assume the bees have "fastest" production speed and the apiaries have 8x production from frames.

Remember on 2.2.3 you NEED frames. On 2.2.8+ they are quite optional.

So you can already see how the production change in 2.2.8+ becomes a nerf at high enough production multipliers.

You will need a little less honey due to combs you got from breeding, breaking hives, getting the pollen/royal jelly, and getting nutdew if you go with Farmed bees for seed oil, but still a lot. 3 apiaries for each of imperial, industrial, and saffron will be able to produce you all the resources for an alveary every 3.476 hours on 2.2.10, 4.357 hours on 2.2.8, or 2.97 on 2.2.3.

If you're on 2.2.3, you'll need 3 proven frames per apiary and to repair them in the thaumic restorer every couple hours. If you don't want to breed saffron, you'll want 3 apiaries for imperial, 3 for industrial, and 9 for majestic. That would take 4.156 hours on 2.2.8+ or 2.752 on 2.2.3. Looks like less time but remember you had to make 67% more apiaries and you could do that with saffron bees too and take even less time. If you're in 2.2.3 and still don't want to breed light blue for "Fastest", you'll need 21% longer. On the other hand, if you really love bee breeding, you can make a magic apiary. It can be made almost as good as an alveary for production and it's and very cheap in terms of resources, BUT requires breeding 16-19 bee species instead of 8-12. Apiaries have a 0.1x production multiplier, alvearies have 1x, and magic apiaries have 0.9x when unboosted and 1.8x when boosted.

However, magic apiaries only have 3 frame slots (which can't be automated) so the highest you can go is 14.4x without GT++ frames. They're less flexible than alvearies so you're eventually just going to want an alveary anyway, most of the time, and you can easily and cheaply spam apiaries to reach the alveary anyway.

Don't even think about using slower/slowest, these would be 3 or 6 times slower (on 2.2.3; on 2.2.8+ it's 2 or 2.5x slower).

3.2 The Industrious/Imperial March
Only 8 species *must* be bred to get the alveary, but I recommend doing 4 more to have the easiest time.

3.3.1 Common
If you take any two hive species and cross breed them, you have a 15% base chance to get Common. I recommend forest/attuned/sorcerous princess + wintry drone. These are pretty easy to find, and will get you started off right with 4x fertility from wintry bees. Forest, attuned, and sorcerous have 3x fertility, making it easier to get there.

The only downside is if your princess becomes wintry, you'll have to let it run in a cold biome for at least one lifespan.

If you don't want to run back and forth to a cold biome all the time, then do forest + attuned/sorcerous instead. You will only have 3x fertility, but majestic bees also have 4x fertility so you can pick up the trait from them instead of wintry. Since this is your first mutation, I'll go into agonizing detail about it. First, make an escritoire and research the wintry drone until you get a research note for forest/attuned/sorcerous + wintry -> common (or forest + attuned/sorcerous -> common if you want to avoid climate hopping).

Research notes boost the mutation chance by 1.5x, BUT only by 5 percentage points at most AND applied after other mutation boosts. Then, get yourself 3 soul frames. These give a 3.375x mutation boost. You might think that this gives an effective chance per mutation attempt of 55.625%, but you would be wrong, because I haven't told you about the BEEKEEPING MODE yet. I swear, it simply wouldn't be possible for me to make this Calvinball system up. The beekeeping mode is an almost invisible set of global modifiers in forestry. It has five settings, ranging from "EASY" to "INSANE". GTNH has it at "HARD", the middle one.

This means that ALL base mutation chances are multiplied by 0.75 BEFORE any other modifiers are applied, and ALL bee lifetimes (in bee ticks) are multiplied by 1.5 BEFORE any other modifiers are applied. Other things can be affected in higher or lower beekeeping modes, but if you decide to change it then you're agreeing to understanding the implications on your own. The upshot of that is that the effective chance per mutation attempt is ~42.968% instead. Mutations are extremely complicated, and I explain them in detail in their own section, but for now I'll go over some cases assuming you followed my advice and used the escritoire and soul frames. There's 2 mutation attempts per offspring: 1 per parent. If you're breeding Forest-Forest (FF) x Wintry-Wintry (WW) or WWxFF, hoping to get Common (C), the possibilities for each offspring are:
 * CC: ~18.463% (p²)
 * CW, WC, FC, or CF: ~49.011% (2p(1-p))
 * FW or WF: ~32.526% ((1-p)²)

Possibilities on the same line are equally likely, eg, there's about a 15% chance of getting FW and there's also about a 15% chance of getting WF, which add to the line total 32.526%. If the queen has a fertility of 4, this means there will be 5 offspring including the princess and you will have a 99.635% chance to get at least 1 of the resulting 10 species slots to be Common. If the queen only has a fertility of 3, this is "only" 98.880%. What happens if you don't use soul frames? Well obviously you would never do that because I told you to use soul frames, but Then, if you have necrotic frames from loot bags or you haven't made the thaumic restorer (the more damaged your rare frames get, the more you need the thaumic restorer) but do have chocolate frames, you can switch out your soul frames and start trying to get a purebred Common bee with 4x fertility.
 * with no frames, no note, and 3x fertility, you get a 61.510% chance for at least one mutation.
 * with no frames, a note, and 4x fertility, you get an 83.023% chance.

Switching away from mutation boosting frames while stat breeding is important because it lets you lower lifetime instead, and also makes you less likely to get the next mutation in the chain (Cultivated in this case) before you have a stable stock of purebred Common bees.

Getting the next mutation immediately would be great, except that oftentimes you need a stock of the first mutation (Common in this case) for other mutations down the line, and you need a purebred Common princess to complete the quest. The advanced bee loot bags give good loot, so losing out on all of it because you got out of sync with the questbook would be unfortunate.

If you get unlucky and run out of bees with the new species after getting a mutation, you'll have to switch back to mutation boosting frames and try again. You won't need another escritoire note though.

If you get lucky and get the next mutation ahead of schedule, put it away for now, and continue trying to breed a purebred of the first mutation. Or just go with it, if you don't care about possibly needing to breed the first mutation again in the future or de-syncing with the questbook.

I generally try to get a purebred of the new species with good stats as follows:
 * 1) if the princess isn't 4x4 (both slots 4 fertility), breed it with your supply of 4x4 drones until it is.
 * 2) keep all bees you get with Common, until you get a purebred princess and a purebred drone.  Then chuck those two together in an apiary and throw the rest in a junk chest, to be fed to the escritoire or beegonia.
 * 3) right now, you only care about 4 slots: the two species slots and the two fertility slots.  Always breed your princess with the drone that matches the most of these until you get the purebred pair you want.  For example, a 4x2 Common-Wintry drone matches two slots, but a 4x4 Common-Forest drone matches 3.  Among drones that match two slots, you can consider one that matches one of each (eg 4x3 Common-Forest) as better than one that matches both of one (eg 4x4 Forest-Wintry).

3.3.2 Cultivated
So, you got common bees? Congratulations. Now you only have 7 left minimum to get the alveary. Cultivated can be bred from Common + any hive species with a base chance of 12%. If you got a research note for wintry + common -> cultivated in the escritoire in the last step then great. Otherwise, put a common drone in the center and do research until you get a note for cultivated. You can either take the first note you get and get that species to 4x4, or you can keep doing the research until you get a note for a species you already have a stock of 4x4s for. With the note and 3 soul frames, you have a 35.375% mutation chance, so you have a 98.729% chance to get at least 1 with purebred parents and a fertility 4 queen.

3.3.3 The Imperial Line

 * 1) Noble: Common + Cultivated.  Escritoire Cultivated if you don't already have a research note (it has fewer mutations than common).  Get a note for Noble and Diligent so you can get both in one go.  10% base mutation chance, 30.3125% with 3 soul + note, 97.298% for at least one mutation with purebred fertility 4 parents.
 * 2) Majestic: Noble (Escritoire target; fewer mutations) + Cultivated.  8% base, 25.25% with 3 soul + note, 94.553%
 * 3) Imperial: Noble (Escritoire target) + Majestic.  8% base

3.3.4 The Industrious Line

 * 1) Diligent: Common + Cultivated (Escritoire target).  10% base
 * 2) Unweary: Diligent (Escritoire target) + Cultivated.  8% base
 * 3) Industrious: Diligent + Unweary (Escritoire target).  8% base

3.3.5 Fastest Production Speed and Best Honey Production
Light blue bees have "fastest" production speed. Your chance of getting the production speed trait out of a mutation is exactly the same as your chance of getting the species trait out of a mutation, although they aren't independent. Saffron will make honey about 3x faster than Majestic.
 * 1) White: Diligent (Escritoire target) + Wintry.  10% base
 * 2) Blue: Forest + Diligent (Escritoire target).  10% base
 * 3) Light Blue: White + Blue (Escritoire target).  10% base
 * 1) Saffron: Meadows + Valiant (Escritoire target).  5% base, 17.656% with 3 soul + note, 85.668%.

= 4 Making the most of the Alveary = Now that you have the alveary, you can take full advantage of your bees and breeding becomes a lot easier. You can use it to make another alveary much faster, or you can use it to breed new bees. Keep in mind that breeding more bees gets you more loot bags, and advanced bee loot bags are very cheap to enchant and give good frames and more alveary components. Your first goal breeding wise should be the stardust bee. It is the easiest source of the "blinding" production speed trait, which is the fastest available. Without even installing any upgrades, the alveary has a couple advantages and disadvantages over the apiary: Before we get into that, here's an overview of the alveary upgrades. You can place upgrades in the bottom two rows of the alveary, EXCEPT you cannot place them in the center. Additionally, in order to do mutations that need a block below, the bottom central block must be a basic alveary block, but otherwise it can be an upgrade.
 * 1) the alveary doesn't have a built in 0.1x production multiplier, so it is much faster by default and at maximum (but not 10x, see the exact production math section).
 * 2) it doubles the range of any bee in it (kinda cringe tbh: you generally want to minimize area to reduce lag, but especially with Flowers: Stone and Effect: None it doesn't matter much)
 * 3) it's way bigger and waaay more expensive
 * 4) it can't be world accelerated

4.1 Basic Upgrades
These are upgrades that only do one thing and are very simple.
 * 1) Alveary Stabilizer: prevent bees from mutating.  This is a fine upgrade, but you'll generally prefer breeding for stats in a single block apiary since it consumes less frame durability and can be world accelerated.  The alveary stabilizer is good in the very niche situation where you have a bee with very peculiar habitat requirements and you want to breed stats onto it from a bee it has a mutation with.  This is so rare it might not even be a thing.  Does not need power.
 * 2) Alveary Transmission: give it power via an enderio conduit or capacitor bank.  Feeding it GT EU works but will waste power because it goes cookie monster on your entire packet (ie it consumes full amps even if it only needs a little power).
 * 3) Hatchery: creates larvae for use in Genetics.  Larvae are exact clones of the princess (and thus queen), and not affected by the drone at all.  Note that larvae cannot be turned into princesses, only drones, and Gendustry can work with drones, princesses, and even queens directly.  Does not need power.
 * 4) Alveary Sieve: adding this reduces lag by having the bee not try to pollinate trees in its range.  You can also put in woven silk to get pollen to manually pollinate trees, but nobody has ever done that.  Does not need power.
 * 5) Swarmer: spawns swarm hives around the working area that contain ignoble copies of the original princess you put it, INCLUDING her generations in captivity.  See the ignoble bee section, tldr: add 3-4 frame housings with gentle frames depending on how many electrical stimulators you have and your ignoble bees can literally last for thousands of years.  There is hardly any benefit to using ignoble bees over pristine, besides that they are slightly easier to get, so make sure you read that section and understand the pros and cons.  Does not need power, but does need royal jelly (or aromatic lumps, but if you're using ignoble princesses you're either using gentle frames or hibeescus to work around them being ignoble, so generating swarm hives faster probably isn't necessary).
 * 6) Rain Shield: acts as if the bee is a tolerant flyer and ignores rain.  Does not need power.
 * 7) Alveary Lighting: makes the bee able to work regardless of time of day.  If you really goof up you could get a bee that is neither nocturnal nor diurnal but this upgrade lets even such a woebegotten (and let's be real for a second: relatable) specimen become productive.
 * 8) Mutator: in theory, this little block is supposed to take various catalysts to boost mutation chances.  For example, soul sand is a 1.5x boost, enderpearls are a 2x boost, and eyes of ender a 4x boost.  It might also accept other things like plutonium and nether stars.  There's no reason not to just give it eyes of ender since they are cheap.  However, I sometimes fail to get a mutation even with it and a 5x mutation electrical stimulator, so idk lol.  Does not need power.

4.2 Climate Control
In, the exact temperature and humidity thresholds for the different temperature and humidity levels are listed. The alveary has the ability to modify its climate, but beware! It is not sane. Temperature and Humidity traits and tolerances have 6 and 3 levels respectively, but they don't evenly subdivide the temperature/humidity range, so the number of Alveary upgrades you need to go from one Temperature/Humidity level to another isn't consistent or related to the number of levels you need to change. These upgrades are fine for changing the climate a few percentage points, and their power (or lava/water) costs are minimal, but they're pretty annoying to craft especially considering that there's no way to automate multiple recipes in one carpenter, so you will definitely want to look into changing biomes with magic at some point.
 * 1) Alveary Heater: boosts the temperature by 20 percentage points.  Sometimes 1 will be enough but you need 6 of these to go from icy to hot.  Unless the biome is < -20, then you could need even more.  Needs power.  Cannot increase temperature to hellish.
 * 2) Alveary Fan: reduces temperature by 20 percentage points.  Needs power.  You may have problems reducing the temperature to icy.
 * 3) Alveary Hygroregulator: Yes, that is really its name.  Does not need power, but does consume water or lava.
 * 4) * With water, it increases humidity 20 percentage points and decreases temperature by 10 percentage points.
 * 5) * With lava, it decreases humidity and increases temperature by the same amounts.
 * 6) * Water is consumed faster than lava, but both are consumed fairly slowly.

The industrial apiary has both incremental climate upgrades like the alveary, and climate upgrades that make it directly emulate a couple different biome types, so it can be easier to use, but it draws comically large amounts of power.

Remember, bees can be made to tolerate any climate and will make their primary products and perform their effects unhindered, but will only make their specialty products in their preferred environment. Also, you can't use heaters/fans to make a biome hellish/not. You need to change the biome. Blazing electron tubes in an electrical stimulator are supposed to make the temperature hellish, but they are bugged so they don't work at all.

4.3 Frame Housing
The frame housing gets its own section because it is the best and most versatile upgrade. It does not need power and you can have many of them (technically up to 17, but you will typically need 0, 1, or 4 per alveary depending on how you use them). Unlike apiaries, you CAN insert/extract from frame housings. Huzzah! Frames take 5x durability damage in frame housings, which is even worse for GT++ frames since they can't be repaired. Frame housings also can bypass the limits on frames. Some frames have a second number in parentheses which is the limit that it can bring a stat to. In the alveary, these limits are not checked (they are checked per frame housing but each frame housing can hold at most one frame). Frames that are good in apiaries will be good in frame housings. See. Most frame effects can be gotten from the electrical stimulator as well, with 3 main exceptions:
 * 1) genetic decay can be reduced by gentle frames, but there's no way to reduce it with electrical stimulators.  Typically not helpful and only affects ignoble bees.  See ignoble bee section.
 * 2) frames can hit exactly 16x production, while stimulators cannot.  This is only useful for bees with production under 29% in 2.2.8 or under 4% in 2.2.3.  It's also a pretty minimal difference, and the power cost of electrical stimulators is truly negligible.  In 2.2.10+, there's an even smaller difference up to 56% base production.  See the exact production math section.
 * 3) oblivion frames (and even necrotic frames) are much better at reducing lifespan than stimulators, although depending on how many you want and how unlucky you are with loot bags/strongholds you may wish to use the stimulator.

4.4 Electrical Stimulator
Do you want to buff your bees' stats but don't want to automate crafting or repairing frames?

Do you want to boost mutations even more?

Do you want to eliminate the range of a bee with an annoying effect?

Then you may enjoy the electrical stimulator. It takes a very small amount of power. You give it a circuit board with some electron tubes soldered on, and it applies buffs. Unsurprisingly, forestry electron tubes are soldered onto forestry circuit boards using a forestry soldering iron. Boards come in 4 sizes, able to hold 1-4 electron tubes. However, you MUST fill all tubes, so you won't always want the highest tier. Every electron tube has at least one effect, which are multiplicative BUT have a per-board cap. There is no inter-board cap.

For example, both diamond and iron boost production, but iron is 1.5x with a 5x cap, and diamond is 2.5x with a 10x cap. So if you have 2 diamond followed by an iron, when the iron's modifier is applied it caps and the board is 5x. If you have 1 iron followed by 2 diamond though, you get 9.375x like you probably expected. Because pristine bees have a chance to become ignoble if you apply a production modifier > 16x, we often care about the highest production multiplier under 16x. You can't hit 16x exactly with electrical stimulators. 15.625x (1 board with 2 diamond and 1 with 1 diamond) is the best you can do without using 5+ stimulators, so you will see me mention 15.625x a lot.

Again, the caps are per board so you can easily get around them using multiple stimulators. Also, every single electron tube increases genetic decay 1.5x, but this doesn't affect pristine bees and for ignoble bees it can be mitigated using gentle frames.

4.5 Next Steps: Stardust Bees and other Breeding
Now that breeding is much easier, why not try to get stardust bees for blinding production speed? The alveary makes mutations easier because you can change its climate without changing the biome, and you can more easily get a much higher mutation multiplier.

Some bees, like the stardust bee, require a specific biome which has a different temperature than either of their parent species prefer. You can breed these without an alveary by first breeding good climate tolerances onto the bee, artificially applying them with Genetics, or you can just use the alveary. There might also be some bee species that require a biome and also a different temperature than that biome has by default, and those would absolutely require the alveary, but I don't remember encountering any such species. Stardust bees should be your next goal. While there are other bees that give blinding production speed, they all require EV+. Stardust bees only require you to reach the end. You can get them in the stone age in theory, but you unlock several tools at HV that make them easier. They need to be bred in the end, on a block of stardust ore, with an arid humidity.

However, the end is not arid. So you will either need to change the biome to an arid one, or use alveary hygroregulators with lava in them. Stardust ore is itself somewhat hard to find because it looks very similar to endstone. I recommend looking on the very large end islands like the purple or red ones.
 * 1) Diligent + Industrious -> Clay, 10%, Clay
 * 2) Majestic + Clay -> Tin, 13%, ic2 Tin
 * 3) Majestic + Clay -> Copper, 13%, ic2 Copper
 * 4) Tin + Copper -> Iron, 13%, Iron
 * 5) Iron + Tin -> Zinc, 13%, Zinc
 * 6) Zinc + Ender -> Stardust, 8%, Stardust Ore, End Dimension, Arid Humidity.

Unlike the bees you bred pre-alveary, these have extra requirements to breed them.

All of them require a particular block to be placed under the bottom center block of the alveary, and the stardust bee itself has a dimension and humidity requirement.

Make sure you chisel the block to the correct version if needed. Typically the different versions have slightly different names, like "Block of Emerald" vs "Emerald Block". If you get a bee that requires "End" flowers, it needs a dragon egg, which can be picked up by shift clicking on it with a sword. If you get a bee that requires "Books" for flowers, it needs bookshelves. Either use 2 electrical stimulators with 4 gold tubes each, or use 1 with 4 and a mutator with eyes of ender. This will boost even the 8% mutation for the Stardust Bee to the max.

4.6 Tipps and Tricks breeding with the Alveary
Lifespan: A very efficient way how to breed bees is to reduce their lifespan down to the minimum. This can be achieved with several electrical stimulators on the alveary. The effects of the electrical stimulators stack multiplicatively. As one electrical stimulator with 4 obsidian tubes reduces the lifespan of a bee to 40% (0.8^4) one can go with +/- 6 electrical stims with obsidian tubes: 0.4^6 = 0.004 of the normal bees lifespan Six electrical stimulators are recommended however five work as well with the downside that some long living bees live more then one bee tick.

Mutation: To guarantee mutation for most bees, 2 electrical stimulators with gold tubes (e.g. 5x5 = 25 times the normal mutation rate) are needed. For all bees with chance below 4% one requires one more golden tube stim. (This can be achieved by simply exchanging one obsidian tube with a gold tube and wait 2 bee ticks in the worst case).

Biomes and Temperature: To account for different temperature and biome requirements it is recommended to have several biomes and temperatures in the base. A basic way to achieve this is to have a base on the border of three biomes (with one being cold, normal and hot ideally) and add a magical forest via a Silverwood tree. For the advanced magician terraforming can be used as well. The most important biomes to have are: normal temperature (e.g. plains) and a cold biome. Alternatively it is possible to use hygro/temperature regulators in the alveary but the space for upgrade blocks is quite limited because of the huge number of electrical stimulators needed. One alveary per biome allows the user to not have to rebuild the alvearies all the time.

= Manual Bee Optimization = The most difficult thing in bee breeding is to isolate advantageous bee traits to create a "super bee" for production. As gendustry is very late game and genetics is a massive time sink and tricky to use, a manual but effective way is proposed here. This strategy takes time and is only recommended for bees actually needed for production or if a bee has only x1 fertility.

With this method you can extract one single trait from a bee without affecting any other trait. This could be done pre-alveary with an oblivion frame or world accelerators as a 1 tick bee life is highly recommended for this strategy. The prerequisite for this process is to have a x4 fertility bee (e.g. wintry bee) as starting point. This strategy is of course also useful to transfer all traits from one species to another.

How to actually do it: Lets imagine we have a bee with 2 favourable traits we want to keep and another bee with one trait we want to move to our original bee. (start bee has: x4 fertility and temp tolerance +-5) new bee has humidity tolerance +-2.

* The process can be optimized somewhat by starting the process with a pure start drone and a princess containing the new trait. Keep using the new princess with pure start drones until the offspring does not contain the new trait anymore. Then continue the process as before with the latest offspring that still has the trait. This way the number of pure bread princesses can be reduced tremendously as many unfavourable traits are washed out without wasting pure bread start princesses.
 * 1) Breed the start princess several times to get many drones.
 * 2) Transfer the genes to more princesses (here automation is recommended as many pure princesses are required)
 * 3) Pair the start bee princess with a new drone that has the new trait.*
 * 4) Select from the offspring  any bee that has the favourable trait (this might be the species if you want to transfer traits to a new species)
 * 5) Repeat step 3 and 4 with a new pure bread start princess a few time but always use the latest offspring. (this is the reason why you need many princesses, you can put the "used princess" from step 4 back into the apiaries to bring it back to the start genes). Use a beealyzer to check the progress, if you are low on honey, just do it 3 times.
 * 6) Now you have a princess + drone with the start bees traits and half of the new trait. E.g. full fertility x4 + temp tolerance +-5 but half humidity tolerance +-2. You can now do a few breeding steps where you try to get 2 times the humidity tolerance in both a drone and the princess. All other traits should match now anyways so there is no other trait to interfere left.  As soon as this is achieved the bees should stack again and you have a new bee with: fertility x4, temp tolerance +-5 and humidity tolerance +-2.

The above process can of course be done with 2 or even more favourable traits in parallel but that will require a lot of beealyzing and many breeding steps to get pure bred bees with all the new stats. It might be that one trait is lost on the way there, but this is not a problem as you can simply finsih the process and then use a drone that already has most favouralbe traits (this reduces the number of steps needed).

This strategy can be used to breed all genes at once onto a new bee species with relatively low effort. Even fertility x1 bees are no problem as you always breed to the starting princesses that have fertility 4. Simply treat the species as the trait you want to take in.

= 5 Botanical Bees = Magic Bees isn't just about thaumcraft anymore! It now has botania and blood magic integration! (Ok so I lied about the blood magic integration, but it does have thermal foundation and ars magica integration that aren't used in gtnh :P) There are three notable botania flowers added by magic bees:
 * 1) Beegonia: converts drones to mana.  It's a good way to recycle drones but doesn't make too much mana.  The amount it creates is based on how far down in the breeding tree the drone's species is.  For example, a wild species drone generates about 186 mana, whereas an infinity drone generates about 1302.  Considering a mana pool holds 1000000 mana, that's 768 infinity drones to fill a mana pool, or nearly 2 hours of 3 excess drones a bee tick from a 4x fertility princess whose lifespan has been minimized.  It isn't the worst way to make mana, but it's towards the bottom of the pack.  However, the other main uses for excess drones are escritoire or dna extractor, so it's great for recycling.
 * 2) Hiveacynth: creates random ignoble hive bees.  Good if you decide to shun conventional wisdom and embrace ignobles.  You also can use it in conjunction with the next flower.  It has a 91% chance to make a drone and only a 9% chance to make a princess each time it generates a bee.  Each bee it generates has a 10% chance to be forced to be a Tolerant Flyer.
 * 3) Hibeescus: convert ignoble princesses to pristine.  It takes 40 minutes and 10000 mana (1% of a mana pool), and it's IV, but it's pretty good especially if you hate exploring.  It can be world accelerated, if you have the mana.  You can use the alveary swarmer to get good ignobles directly, or just use the hiveacynth and breed them to be good later (easier to automate).

= 6 Magic Apiaries: Meme or No Meme =

They're a meme.

You can't automate frames in Magic Apiaries, so their potential is seriously cut short.

Magic apiaries are like an intermediate step between apiaries and alvearies.

They have a base production modifier of 0.9x, but they can be boosted (using mana or centivis) to have a production modifier of 1.8x instead, and/or to have a mutation modifier of 2x and a lifespan modifier of 0.5x.

They also only require 5 pieces of pollen/beeswax/whatever instead of like 2.6k so they are 3 orders of magnitude cheaper than alvearies.

The drawback is that they require over twice as much breeding to get started, their max production modifier is 14.4x and their maximum mutation modifier with an oblivion frame is only 4.5x, and they don't have climate control.

They also can't be world accelerated on 2.2.3 (same as basic apiaries), but I'm not sure about 2.2.8+.

Oh, you'll also need an energized node OR mana apiary booster.

If you don't have frames, it is not worth boosting it on 2.2.8+, only on 2.2.3. This is because boosted or not, without frames it is below the threshold of 4 where the housing production term in the nerfed formula matters at least 1%.

On 2.2.10, it would take 4.362 hours to get enough honey using a fastest saffron bee in a booster magic apiary with 8x from frames.

This is only 2.4x faster than a normal apiary though, and it's similar on 2.2.8 and 2.2.3.

Rational people will point out that you could just use twice as many apiaries instead, and they wouldn't be wrong, but *magic*.

Also, to be clear, while using frames in regular apiaries in 2.2.8+ is next to pointless, you definitely do need them in the magic apiary. This is because the nerfed formula basically ignores production multipliers under 4, and the regular apiary caps at 0.8.

The magic apiary is outclassed by the alveary and industrial apiary in pretty much every way besides cost.

For bees with high base production chances, it can be an actually good choice for industrial scale production, but since you can't automate frames this is basically only combs over 50% base production chance.

= 7 Genetics: Gendustry lite = The Genetics mod adds a lot of machines, but it mainly has two uses: increasing tolerance with the acclimatizer, and genetically modifying larvae which can be incubated into drones. Both of these can be accomplished other ways, but if you can't stand breeding for stats then check out the genetics mod.

7.1 Acclimatizer
This machine can work on any bee, and doesn't need you to get into the rest of the mod. Depending on the catalyst item you give it, it has a chance per catalyst item of increasing temperature/humidity tolerance up/down/both. The changes to the tolerance are heritable. This is very convenient and easier than breeding once you set up the required machines.

Genetics machines have pretty good nei support so check out the acclimatizer there.

However, stardust bees already have both 2 tolerance in temperature and humidity, so if you follow my advice you'll already have that soon after the alveary.

Both 2 humidity is sufficient to ignore humidity (outside of specialty products obviously), and both 2 temperature will suffice to allow any bee that doesn't prefer hellish to work in normal.

So outside of hellish temperature, stardust bees basically do the same thing as the acclimatizer, but the latter is easier. There are also bees with both 3 tolerances, and even both 5.

7.2 Gene Editing
You can also use other machines from Genetics to extract, copy, and insert any genetic traits.

Extracting is chance based and you can just copy bees by breeding them anyway, but extracted genes are reusable and does not kill the target. You will first want some incubators. These are needed to create different kinds of bacteria, make enzyme and growth medium, and incubate larvae into drones.

Once you have each kind of bacteria, you can instead use an incubator to multiply it, which is cheaper. You don't need to dedicate an incubator to each recipe if you don't want to. You can batch craft bacteria instead.

Growth medium can also be made in the gregtech brewery, and the bacteria can be made in the bio vat, although the latter is quite complicated and beyond the scope of this humble tutorial.

You will probably want at least 2 incubators, one to make enzyme, and one to incubate drones and multiply your bacteria supplies if they run low.


 * 1) get some bees which have the stats you want.  The more stats they have that you want the better, since it extracts a random one, but it will still eventually work with only one stat you care about.
 * 2) for some traits like fertility, you can find wild bees that have them, like wintry.
 * 3) the isolator gets traits off of bees, the genepool converts bees into raw DNA (this kills the bee) which is used by some other machines.
 * 4) these traits/genes can be amplified in the polymerizer (technically optional for this part, AND can be replaced by the thaumic restorer) and then scanned in the sequencer.  If you place scanned samples in a chest, the hologlasses will show them as only one stack if they are the same.  Once your sample is successfully scanned, you'll be able to select that gene in the gene database for making serum arrays.
 * 5) then use the gene database to create a serum array with the traits you care about.  You can select from any traits you've discovered in the gene database.  This will overwrite the traits of larvae.  It has durability, I'm not sure if it can be repaired.
 * 6) serum arrays need to be polymerized before they can be used.  You can also use the polymerized to make extracted genes work faster in the sequencer, but the thaumic restorer can cheese this.  It can't cheese the required polymerization before serum arrays can be used.
 * 7) now you need to generate larvae, so use a hatchery in your alveary and you will get larvae.  The hatchery has a 1/2400 chance each game tick to create a larva, so it generates one every 2 minutes on average.  These larvae are genetic copies of the princess/queen.
 * 8) once you take a larva and apply a serum array to it, the serum array will overwrite any traits that were set in it, and any other traits will remain unaltered.
 * 9) now use the incubator to turn the larva into a drone.
 * 10) breed the drone with any princess.

You will want many drones so you can repeat this step over and over until the princess has the genes you want, if you want to be able to semi automate it and not have to check the offspring and do selective breeding like you normally would.

No, you cannot turn larvae directly into princesses. The hive swarmer can do that although they will be Ignoble and Genetics won't be able to edit their genes.

= 8 Gendustry = Gendustry has a gene editing system which is similar to Genetics but with two great improvements: genetic templates don't have durability, and you can edit drones, princesses, and even queens directly. Pro tip: edit queens.

The only disadvantages are that extracting Gendustry gene samples kills the bee you extract from, which is extremely minor since drones are free, and gendustry is very gated.

Imprinting also has a chance to kill the input bee, but the mutatron makes purebred bees so you can and should make sure to breed drones and extract their genes until you get the species. You will need LuV and Naquadah bees to make these machines. Gendustry also provides the mutatron, which can do almost any mutation, ignoring requirements and randomness. Ignoring the randomness is almost completely useless, but there are some niche cases when the ability to ignore other requirements comes in very handy.

However, some bees are blacklisted from the mutatron. Iirc, this is americium, infinity catalyst, infinity, cosmic neutronium, the holiday/Chad bees, and, in 2.2.3, the indium bee. It's especially useful for space bees in a no space playthrough. The DNA extractor is needed to fuel most other machines. The protein liquifier is only used for the genetic replicator. The genetic replicator can make princesses out of just genes and protein+dna, but they will be Ignoble (not very useful imo, use the genetic imprinter). The genetic transposer can make copies of genes, which is useful when you want the same gene in multiple templates, but remember that the templates can be reused indefinitely. The genetic imprinter applies all genes in a template to a bee, which can be a drone, princess, or queen (so just apply it directly to queens). Any gene not in the template will be unchanged. It does have a chance to kill the bee being imprinted, so if it is a new species make sure to either breed drones and extract the species trait first, or just ignore the problem and hit up the mutatron again if you get unlucky. Finally, the genetic sampler is used to extract genes from bees. This KILLS the bee, unlike genetics mod, but otherwise Gendustry is much easier to use since genes are extracted directly as items and you only need one kind of fuel ever (dna). On the mutation side, there are three machines. The mutagen producer simply makes the fuel needed by the mutatron. The mutatron and advanced mutatron both ignore breeding conditions and always produce a purebred mutation, but the advanced mutatron can select which mutation you get in the case where multiple are possible, whereas the regular mutatron will give you a random one. There are some bees blacklisted from both, namely the cosmic neutronium, infinity catalyst, infinity, americium, Chad, and holiday bees. In 2.2.3, the indium bee is also disabled. There may be more disabled in later versions, for instance dragon blood and neutronium. = 9 Exact Production Math for 24 Significant Figure Fiends = So, you've come to learn the forbidden numbers? After 2.2.3, bee production was heavily nerfed due to a new production chance formula that is ... mathematically creative. Additionally, there is a bug until after 2.2.9 which effectively reduces the primary production of any product with a base chance under 100%.

Check out if this sounds like nonsense.

In 2.2.3, the adjusted probability PERCENT (effective percent chance to get a product each bee tick) is

min(c*m*s, 100)

where c is the base production chance PERCENT, m is the production modifier from the housing, and s is the speed value of the bee (see ). The values for m start at 0.1x for bee house/apiary, 0.9x for unboosted magic apiary, 1.8 for boosted magic apiary, or 1 for alveary, iapiary, and mega apiary. This is then multiplied by the modifiers for frames (see ), stimulators (see stimulator section above), and beekeeping mode (1x unless you changed it). In 2.2.8+, the adjusted probability (percent) is

min((1 + t/6)*2*(1 + s)*sqrt(c) + (m/4)^cbrt(c) - 3, 100)

where c, m, s are the same and t is 1 in bee houses, apiaries, magic apiaries, and alvearies, 8 in the iapiary, and the energy tier in the mega apiary.

Going forwards, we will assume that we are using blinding production speed bees in a non gregtech housing. Thus, t will be 1 and s will be 2. This lets us simplify the 2.2.8+ formula to min(7*sqrt(c) + (m/4)^cbrt(c) - 3, 100). This is only the first half of the story though. Now let's look at how the adjusted probability percent is used. Before 2.2.10, every bee tick, products are calculated in three steps: For purebred bees, the primary and secondary species are the same. In 2.2.10, or in all versions in the iapiary, the products will be calculated the same way except the second step is fixed to instead be: In the mega apiary, adjusted probabilities are treated differently and don't cap at 100%, so you can get huge multipliers. So what are the best multipliers to use? When is production guaranteed to cap out? For now, assume ALL bees are blinding production speed. In 2.2.3, any multiplier of 12.5x or higher will boost any base chance of 4% or higher to 100%, which is the cap (remember, the bug that will be fixed in 2.2.10 prevents the second roll, unless the base chance is 100%). If the base chance is 3% or lower, going over 12.5x has marginal benefits, but you are capped at 16x unless you want to deal with ignobles, so you can't boost any 3% or lower products to 100% unless using ignobles. 50x will boost even 1% products to 100%, see Ignoble Bee section. In 2.2.8, 15.625x will boost any base chance of 29% or higher to 100%. So there is no advantage to higher multipliers at all unless you are dealing with less likely products. In 2.2.8, 16x will boost any base chance of 28% or higher to 100%. If using ignoble bees, you can go all the way up to 384x to make even 1% products guaranteed. In 2.2.10, the math will be the same for specialty products. However, 200% yield is actually possible for non-guaranteed products, by making sure the second roll is also guaranteed. The cutoff for 15.625x is 58% or higher. For 16x, it's 56% or higher. Any primary product with a lower base chance than that can't be guaranteed without becoming an Ignoble Bee Enjoyer. To max out a 1% base chance primary product, you would need 1291.6x production, because the value of c that gets handed to the special formula is 0.5%. That's only 4 electrical stimulators with 2 diamond tubes each, which is still manageable, see next section.
 * 1) For every possible primary product for the primary species of the queen, calculate its adjusted probability and then generate one with that probability.
 * 2) For every possible primary product of the secondary species of the queen THAT HAS A BASE CHANCE OF 100%, calculate its adjusted probability and then generate one with that probability.  For purebred bees, the secondary species is the same as the primary species.  If you thought "that sounds weird", you'd be totally correct.  This is due to a bug from base forestry, but I've discussed it with Runakai and submitted a pull request.  So if you like bees, REALLY thank Runakai.  100% adjusts to 100% in 2.2.3.  In 2.2.8 it will as long as you use a decent production multiplier, but could be lower (with blinding production speed you need 8.5x or more).
 * 3) If both the primary and secondary species are jubilant, for every possible specialty product of the primary species, calculate its adjusted probability and then generate one with that probability.
 * For every possible primary product of the secondary species of the queen, divide its base chance by 2 and then calculate the adjusted probability based on that.
 * Then generate a product with that probability.

= 10 But What About the Industrial Apiary =

The Industrial Apiary, aka iapiary, is a very power hungry advanced bee housing.

It has upgrades similar to the alveary, but they are mostly more limited.

Its biggest advantage is the speed upgrades you can give it which act as built in world accelerators.

Each one takes about 1/6th the power of a real world accelerator in tile mode of the same tier, and costs about 1/6th of a WA of that tier, to simulate the fact that you could also just cluster 6 normal apiaries/magic apiaries around one regular WA, and then ponder how to power it.

The other upgrades take less power, but still a lot, so you should try to breed your bees to not need them.

However, the production upgrades are currently bugged and will probably be buffed soon.

We just saw exactly how the rate bees produce things is calculated. The industrial apiary uses the same formula, but calculates t and m differently and can apply built in world acceleration.

Due to the production upgrade bug, the industrial apiary has an m value of at most 2.

Unless m is over 4, the second term in the nerfed production formula increases the effective production by at most 1 percentage point.

That means that using production upgrades increases your power consumption by a lot, without actually increasing your production by a nontrivial amount.

The base m value for the iapiary is 0, and production upgrades each add 0.25 to that. You can have up to 8 of them, giving an m of 2, or you can use the tier 8 speed upgrade with built in production upgrade to give you an m value of 2 and 256x time acceleration in a single upgrade slot.

This means that the iapiary is carried by the fact that t = 8 doubles the first term compared to t = 1, and it can have built in world acceleration for slightly cheaper than an actual WA.

The power consumption (EU/t) is
 * a*37*2^n if n is 0 or 1
 * 148*a + 32 if n is 2
 * a*37*2^n + 8*4^n otherwise

where n is the tier of speed upgrade installed (or 0 for none), and a is the modifier from installed upgrades, which is multiplicative and starts at 1.

So with a tier 8 speed upgrade and no others, it would consume 533760 EU/t.

10.1 Industrial Upgrades

 * 1) Speed Upgrades: These come in 8 tiers, and each one speeds up the iapiary by a factor of 2^n.  This is done by just literally making everything, including bee ticks, that many times faster, and incurs a power cost similar to a world accelerator, discussed above.  None of the speed upgrades (besides the speed 8 upgrade with production upgrade) increase the cost multiplier a, only the world acceleration tier n.  The parameter t passed to the nerfed production formula is always 8, and does not depend on n at all
 * 2) Speed 8 + Production Upgrade: Worthless due to the production upgrade bug, just use the speed 8 upgrade for now.  This acts exactly like a tier 8 speed upgrade and 8 production upgrades in the same slot
 * 3) Production Upgrade: You can have up to 8 of these.  Each increases m by +0.25, from the base value for an iapiary of 0.  Each also increases a by 1.4x.  These are completely worthless due to a bug
 * 4) Plains Upgrade: Sets biome to plains, increase a by 1.2x
 * 5) Light Upgrade: Lets the bee work regardless of time of day, increase a by 1.05x.  Using diurnal+nocturnal bees is preferred, especially once you have gendustry and can just imprint them
 * 6) Flowering Upgrade: Increases flowering and pollination rate by 1.2x, increase a by 1.1x, limit of 8.  Unique effect, but only useful for forestry tree breeding
 * 7) Winter Upgrade: Sets the biome to taiga and increases a by 1.5x
 * 8) Dryer Upgrade: Changes the humidity modifier by -0.25 (on a 0.0-1.0 scale I believe), increase a by 1.05x, limit of 8
 * 9) Automation Upgrade: Automatically moves the princess and first drone offspring back into the input slots so they immediately recombine.  Increase a by 1.1x.  Probably just use conduits
 * 10) Humidifier Upgrade: Exactly the same as the Dryer Upgrade, except it changes the humidity modifier by +0.25 and increases a by 1.1x
 * 11) Hell Upgrade: Sets the biome to hell, increase a by 1.5x
 * 12) Pollen Upgrade: Reduces flowering/pollination to 0, and increases a by 1.3x.  Giving your bees a flowers trait that doesn't spread flowers/pollen is preferred, especially once you have gendustry and can just imprint them
 * 13) Desert Upgrade: Sets biome to desert and increase a by 1.2x
 * 14) Cooler Upgrade: Exactly the same as the Dryer Upgrade, but for temperature instead of humidity
 * 15) Lifespan Upgrade: Cuts lifespan by 1.5x, and increases a by 1.05x, limit of 4.  Not as much of a breeding speed upgrade as tiering up your speed upgrades, but possibly cheaper
 * 16) Seal Upgrade: Let the bees ignore rain, increase a by 1.05x.  Putting tolerant flyer on your bees or changing your personal dim to never rain is preferred since those are free and save you slots for other upgrades if needed.
 * 17) Stabilizer Upgrade: Lets you use Ignoble bees without them ever dying.  Increases a by 2.5x.  Hibeescus is preferred, especially because it can be world accelerated
 * 18) Jungle Upgrade: Set biome to jungle, increase a by 1.2x
 * 19) Territory Upgrade: Increase range by 1.5x, increase a by 1.05x, limit of 4
 * 20) Ocean Upgrade: Set biome to ocean, increase a by 1.2x
 * 21) Sky Upgrade: Pretend the bee is cave dwelling, increase a by 1.05x.  Putting cave dwelling on your bees is preffered, especially once you have gendustry.
 * 22) Heater Upgrade: Exactly the same as the dryer and cooler upgrades, but increases temperature modifier by +0.25 each
 * 23) Sieve Upgrade: Similar to pollen upgrade except it doesn't actually stop flowering and it gives you pollen and it only increases a by 1.05x

= 11 Ignoble Bee Enjoyer Manifesto = Pristine Bees are great. As long as you treat them right and don't crank up the production multiplier of their habitat over 16, they live forever and you don't have to worry about them.

However, it can be such a hassle to explore the world, trade with villagers, or buy hives in the QB. And all those ignoble bees ... they're just sitting in your chests doing nothing. Surely you can use them for something? Well, you shouldn't, but you can.

Ignoble bees offer two advantages over pristine:
 * 1) they are easier to get renewably, since you can use the alveary swarmer, hivecynth, or just extra hive princesses;
 * 2) and they can handle over 16x production multiplier.

As stated many times though, since production is capped at 100%, this has pretty limited utility. You would almost certainly be better off just making more alvearies or whatever.

Also, ignoble bees have a 2% times genetic decay chance to die each lifespan. You can mitigate this by giving them a longer lifespan, using lifespan multipliers, and using gentle frames. Pristine Bees that exceed the 16x production multiplier have a 1.56% chance of becoming ignoble each bee tick at (16+ε)x, up to 100% at 100.5x.

So there's two ways to enjoy ignoble bees: just absolutely skyrocket the production multiplier to literally a morbillion, or shrink ray the genetic decay rate to a subnormal number. To the first point, remember that production is capped at 100%. So assuming blinding production speed, in 2.2.3 there is no point in going over 50x production, and in 2.2.8 no point in going over 384x. In 2.2.10 this cap is effectively 200% because a bug was fixed (see previous section), so 1291.6x is necessary if you want 1% chance primary outputs to cap production (ie if you want their second roll at half chance, 0.5%, to also reach the cap of 100%). These are doable with 3, 3, and 4 electrical stimulators respectively.

Now for the second point, the good people over at forestry decided to use floats for their random number generation. The average programmer believes that Random.nextFloat returns a real number uniformly distributed between 0 and 1.

However, this is not the case. Instead, it generates a random integer uniformly distributed between 0 and 2²⁴-1 (both inclusive) and then divides it by 2²⁴.

This means if you have 3 gentle frames, there is only a 1/2²⁴ chance of an ignoble princess dying instead of producing another generation.

If you could put 22 gentle frames, due to limits of floating point numbers, the chance of ignoble bees dying would actually become 0, but unfortunately you can only fit 17 at most. Because of how Random.nextFloat works, there's absolutely no point using more than 3 gentle frames unless you can get to 22 (or are using stimulators/frames that increase genetic decay), this is merely a fun curiosity. The expected number of lifetimes an ignoble princess will last after stacking enough gentle frames to bring her genetic decay under 1/2²⁴ is, obviously, 2²⁴. So if she is Eon, she should last 8772 real life years on average before decaying.

Depending on how long you intend to play for, you may wish to add lapis electron tubes or lifespan increasing frames to make this longer, but if you do, remember to add enough gentle frames to keep 0.02 times genetic decay under 1/2²⁴. The max production multiplier a single alveary block can give is 10x (3 diamond or "more"), from a maxed electrical stim. However, 6.25x (2 diamond) is better because it only gives 2.25x genetic decay instead of 3.375x, less decay per production.

3 electrical stimulators with 2 diamond tubes and 1 with 1 will send even 1% products to 100% in 2.2.8.

2 with 2 diamond and 1 with 1 iron is enough in 2.2.3.

In 2.2.10, 4 stimulators with double diamond tubes will be needed.

All of these require going up to 4 gentle frames. Remember though, the production of a single bee can ONLY exceed 1 of a product each bee tick if one of the following applies:
 * 1) it is a primary product with base chance 100%
 * 2) it is any primary product starting in 2.2.10
 * 3) the bee is in an iapiary or mega apiary.

The iapiary can take acceleration upgrades, and apiaries/maybe magic apiaries can be world accelerated, but outside of that there's no way around this. In 2.2.8, for a product with a base production ≥29%, it is guaranteed every bee tick in a 15.625x alveary. For a base production ≥28%, it is guaranteed in a 16x alveary.

In other words, ignoble bees have no advantage besides being easier to get unless you care about a product with a base chance under 28%, and even then, you're probably better off building more alvearies or iapiaries for them, rather than orchestrating a monstrous setup with ignoble bees. 1% products in a 15.625x alveary have a 7.90625% production chance in 2.2.8 and effectively 12.805% in 2.2.10. In 2.2.3, obviously any product with a base production ≥4% is guaranteed every bee tick even in a 15.625x alveary. So in that version, boosting over 16x and consequentially ignoble bees are only useful at all for 1%-3% products. Normally, the cost of using ignoble princesses is that you need to automate giving them the correct traits, whether by repeatedly breeding them with a stack of drones or using Gendustry.

With Magic Bees, the Hibeescus is also an option, simply making ignoble bees become pristine.

However, using my cool gentle frame trick, you can just automate gentle frames instead. So you basically have 5 options for using ignoble bees:
 * 1) Generate ignoble bees and set their genes through repeated breeding with drones from a pristine princess in an apiary/alveary.  This is goofy, don't do this.
 * 2) Generate ignoble bees and set their genes through repeated breeding with drones from a Genetics incubator.  This is even more goofy because now you need to use a breeder alveary, absolutely don't do this.
 * 3) Generate ignoble princesses, mate them with random drones, then set their genes with Gendustry.  This is the option for ultra wealthy thaumcraft haters who've reached LuV.
 * 4) Autocraft gentle frames and export them into your alvearies, thus making your ignoble bees effectively pristine.  Now we're getting somewhere, this way we only need to set up the princesses once.
 * 5) Craft a few more gentle frames than you need and automate pulling them from frame housings for a quick touch up in the thaumic restorer before replacing them.  This is the best way because it requires much less thaumcraft automation than the previous way.

= 12 Exact Mutation Math for Non-Commutative Nerds = So, how EXACTLY does mutation work?

Well, you could read [Bee.createOffspring], or you could heed my wisdom. Let A and B be the primary and secondary species of the original princess, and C and D be the primary and secondary species of the original drone.

For each offspring (princess and drones) generated, it will use the original princess as the first parent and the original drone as the second. There is a 50% chance that it will TRY to replace the original princess (first parent) with a mutation between A and D, and 50% that it will TRY to replace it with a mutation between B and C.

The same thing occurs for the original drone (second parent).

Notice that this is probably not what the devs intended, because it isn't possible to get a mutation between A and C or B and D. But that's what they wrote. When trying to do a mutation between say A and D, it tries all the possible mutations in order.

So if there are no possible mutations for A+D, this always fails and that parent isn't replaced.

On the other hand, if there are multiple possible mutations, it's possible for a previous one to be picked and the one we care about not to be reached, and possible for it to be reached, fail, and then have a later mutation succeed. Mutations with missing requirements are effectively skipped. Then, for each heritable trait, it pulls either the primary or secondary from each parent, in a random order, ie the first parent's trait could end up in the second slot. Let X0, X1, and X2 be the possible mutations between A and D, and Y0, Y1, and Y2 be the possible mutations between B and C, in order.

I'm assuming the code uses a consistent ordering among all mutations. Such an ordering obviously exists, but it's definitely possible the code doesn't use one. This doesn't really matter since I only know of four cases where a pair of species has two possible mutations: the initial split in the imperial/industrious line, the initial split in the magic bees starting line, the initial split in the valuable bee line, and crumbling vs transmuting. None of these even have 3+ possible mutations, only 2.

Regardless, you can think of X0, X2, Y0, and Y2 not as single species but as collections of 0+ species, to account for all these cases. Then let p0, p1, p2, q0, q1, and q2 be the probabilities of getting the corresponding mutations, conditioned on not getting any previous mutation, ie their adjusted base probabilities.

When eg X0 is an empty collection, p0 will be 0 to match. Finally, we will denote the complement of a probability p as p' rather than (1-p) as the following formula is quite overzealous already. All possible offspring genotypes ignoring order can then be found using the formula

¼(m² + ½mn(A + B + C + D) + ¼n²(A + B)(C + D))

where m = p0X0 + p0'p1X1 + p0'p1'p2X2 + q0Y0 + q0'q1Y1 + q0'q1'q2Y2 and n = p0'p1'p2' + q0'q1'q2'. By expanding this expression and finding the coefficient for, say, AX1, we find the probability of getting an offspring with genotype AX1 or X1A. Let's go through what happens when we apply this to the typical breeding scenario where B=A and D=C. Then by definition Yi=Xi and qi=pi and the formula simplifies to

¼(m² + mn(A + C) + n²AC)

with m = 2(p0X0 + p0'p1X1 + p0'p1'p2X2) and n = 2p0'p1'p2'. Now let's say we want to know the probability of getting at least one X1 species.

Then we would have to add the coefficients of AX1, CX1, X1X1, X0X1, and X2X1, so let's find those.

Notice that the expression is split into three parts:
 * m², which contains all genotypes with 2 mutations
 * 1) mn(A + C), which contains all genotypes with 1 mutation
 * 2) n²AC, which contains the unique genotype AC with no mutations

[AX1] = [CX1] = p0'p1'p2'p0'p1  [X0X1] = 2p0p0'p1   [X1X1] = (p0'p1)² [X2X1] = 2p0'p1'p2p0'p1 In the case when there's only 1 possible mutation, p0=p2=0, so p0'=p2'=1, and we get

[AX1] = [CX1] = p1'p1  [X1X1] = p1² [X0X1] = [X2X1] = 0. That agrees with the result we got for Meadows-Meadows x Wintry-Wintry earlier. Now let's find tables for all 14 non uniform pairs of bees with species from A and B with one mutation C with probability p.
 * AAxBB and BBxAA:

AB+BA: (1-p)² AC+BC+CA+CB: 2p(1-p) CC: p²


 * Probability of at least one C: 2p-p²


 * AAxAB, AAxBA, ABxAA, and BAxAA:

CC: ¼p² CA+AC: ¾p(1-½p) CB+BC: ¼p(1-½p) AA: ¼(2-2p+½p²) AB+BA: ¼(2-2p+½p²)


 * Probability of at least one C: p-¼p²


 * BBxBA, BBxAB, BAxBB, and ABxBB are obviously the same as the previous table but with A and B swapped (if cross breeding weren't label agnostic it would be nonsensical).
 * ABxAB and BAxBA:

CC: p²  CA+CB+AC+BC: 2p(1-p) AA+BB+AB+BA: (1-p)²


 * Probability of at least one C: 2p-p²


 * ABxBA and BAxAB (cursed hybrids):

AA+BB+AB+BA: 1


 * Probability of at least one C: 0
 * (No mutations due to likely dev oversight.)

(The uniform pairs AAxAA and BBxBB aren't interesting. In the case when A+A has a mutation, the chances can be recovered by setting B=A in the AAxBB table.)

= Appendix: Bee Production Examples =

Suppose we have a bee with a product "bananas" that has a base chance of 5%. How many bananas per hour would we get with some different setups? We will assume the bee has blinding production speed and we are working in 2.2.8.

Alveary: 15.625x Electron Tubes
We start with the general formula

min((1 + t/6)*2*(1 + s)*sqrt(c) + (m/4)^cbrt(c) - 3, 100)

Since we are not in a gregtech housing, t is 1. For blinding, s is 2. We said the base chance c for bananas was 5. For the standard 1 board with 2 diamond tubes and 1 with 1 alveary setup, m is 15.625.

So we get

min((1 + 1/6)*2*(1 + 2)*sqrt(5) + (15.625/4)^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(7*sqrt(5) + 3.90625^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(22.93..., 100) 22.93...

This is the percent chance of generating a banana each bee tick. Since we are in 2.2.8 and bananas do not have a base chance of 100%, there is no second roll. Thus, each bee tick, we get 0.2293 bananas. The alveary cannot be world accelerated. Therefore, the number of bananas we expect to get in 1 hour is

0.2293... bananas/bee tick * 1 bee tick/27.5 seconds * 60 seconds/1 minute * 60 minutes/1 hour 30.01... bananas/hour.

Alveary: 16x Frames
min((1 + 1/6)*2*(1 + 2)*sqrt(5) + (16/4)^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(7*sqrt(5) + 4^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(23.35..., 100) 23.35...

30.57... bananas/hour = 0.2335/27.5*3600

As you can see, the increase from 15.625x to 16x is quite small.

Alveary: Ignoble, capped production
Now let's look at how much we'd have to boost the production to get to the 100% cap, and see how many more bananas we could squeeze out of ignoble bees.

First, we have to find the production multiplier needed to cap production. To do this, we start by setting the production formula equal to 100, and then solve for m:

min((1 + 1/6)*2*(1 + 2)*sqrt(5) + (m/4)^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) == 100 min(12.65... + (m/4)^1.7099..., 100) == 100 12.65... + (m/4)^1.7099... >= 100   (m/4)^1.7099 >= 87.35...    m/4 >= 13.66...    m >= 54.62...

We can get a high enough m either by using 6 2x frames, giving a multiplier of 64x, or by using 1 electrical stimulator with 2 diamond tubes and 1 with 1 iron then 2 diamond, giving a multiplier of 58.59375x.


 * In the first case, we need 9 frame housings (6 for 2x frames and 3 for gentle frames).
 * In the second case, we need 4 frame housings (for gentle frames) and 2 electrical stimulators.

In both cases, we reach the production cap, so our bees will make a banana every bee tick, and we will get

130.90... bananas/hour.

Thus, by using ignoble bees, we make the setup much more complicated because we need to automate or auto repair gentle frames, but we need 4.28x fewer alvearies. Is this worth it? It's up to you. It could be worth it simply because you think it sounds fun. Notice that 130 products/hour is always what we'll get when correctly enjoying ignoble bees, unless the primary production bug has been fixed in your version in which case you get twice as many. Alvearies cannot be world accelerated so this production rate is final.

Magic Apiary: HV WA and Booster, no frames
That's right, I still haven't tested if frames can be automated in the magic apiary.

The magic apiary has a base m value of 1.8x when boosted, so we will first find the production chance each bee tick and then discuss world acceleration.

min((1 + 1/6)*2*(1 + 2)*sqrt(5) + (1.8/4)^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(7*sqrt(5) + 0.45^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(12.90..., 100) 12.90...

0.1290... bananas/bee tick * 1 bee tick/27.5 seconds * 8x (HV world accelerator) * 3600 seconds/hour 135.09... bananas/hour

Notice though that if you can't/don't automate frames, then this is basically the same as an unboosted (but still world accelerated) magic apiary, or even a regular apiary, which reach an adjusted probability percent of 12.73... and 12.65..., respectively.

In other words, using the magic apiary over a regular apiary is only worth it if you give it frames.

Remember, a WA can apply to 5 apiaries/magic apiaries at the same time, so it effectively costs one fifth as much to WA each one.

Magic Apiary: HV WA and Booster, 8x Frames
Now, m is 1.8x times 8x

min((1 + 1/6)*2*(1 + 2)*sqrt(5) + (14.4/4)^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(7*sqrt(5) + 3.6^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(21.59..., 100)

226.11... bananas/hour = 0.2159.../27.5*8*3600

Mmm, banana. Assuming we have 5 of these, the average cost to WA each is 614.4 EU/t.

Industrial Apiary: Tier 3 Speed upgrade, 8 production upgrades
For the industrial apiary, t is 8 instead of 1, so the first term in the nerfed formula formula literally doubles to start. Unfortunately, even with max production upgrades it only gets an m of 0.25.

min((1 + 8/6)*2*(1 + 2)*sqrt(5) + (2/4)^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(14*sqrt(5) + 0.5^cbrt(5) - 3, 100) min(28.61..., 100) 28.61...

Not only is this the best adjusted probability we've seen so far barring ignoble bee memes, but we also get a speed upgrade of 8x on top of this:

299.63... bananas/hour = 0.2861.../27.5*8*3600

The downside of course is that the industrial apiary is expensive and guzzles power, especially if you want to spam them. But you know what they say, you gotta have money to make money. In particular, it will cost 808 EU/t.

Mega Apiary
Yes.

= Appendix: Traits =
 * 1) Species: determines preferred temperature and humidity, plus what items the bee can produce.  Secondary species does affect this too, recall that both species must be jubilant to get specialty products from the primary species, and primary products from the secondary species may occur (half as often in lieu of bugs).  Most of the time we deal with purebred bees though.
 * 2) Lifespan: shortest-eon; how many bee ticks (27.5 seconds) the bee lives for.  Don't worry about this.  Lifespan modifiers affect this, ie number of bee ticks not duration of bee tick, so once you have the technology you can make your bees only live 1 bee tick.
 * Name (number of bee ticks):
 * 1) * Shortest (10)
 * 2) * Shorter (20)
 * 3) * Short (30)
 * 4) * Shortened (35)
 * 5) * Normal (40)
 * 6) * Elongated (45)
 * 7) * Long (50)
 * 8) * Longer (60)
 * 9) * Longest (70)
 * 10) * Eon (600)
 * Pre alveary stimulator/oblivion frame, you technically want this shorter, but it's not worth the effort. For bees that you have producing things, longer is technically better since the time to reinsert the princess and form a new queen is not quite zero, but again it doesn't matter.  Remember that the lifespan in bee ticks is multiplied by the beekeeping mode modifier, 1.5x.
 * 1) Production: boosts chance of products (see production analysis section for the formula that uses this)
 * 2) * Slowest (0.3)
 * 3) * Slower (0.6)
 * 4) * Slow (0.8)
 * 5) * Normal (1)
 * 6) * Fast (1.2)
 * 7) * Faster (1.4)
 * 8) * Fastest (1.7)
 * 9) * Blinding (2)
 * Two notes on this:
 * 1) While these work exactly how you would think, by multiplying base probability, in gtnh 2.2.3, Runakai made up some really goofy formula for 2.2.8 that is more complicated than that (oh and a huge nerf).
 * 2) Also, Runakai might eventually add robotic (2.5) and accelerated (4), which would be great because higher production can't lead to genetic damage.
 * 3) Pollination: Slowest-Maximum; how fast the bee pollinates forestry trees.  This is bad and a source of lag, but you can ignore this stat.  Alveary sieves completely stop pollination.  Only some flower types do pollination.
 * 4) Flower Type: What kind of flower the bee needs in range to work
 * 5) * Sea: water
 * 6) * Books: bookshelves
 * 7) * Dead Bushes: dead bushes
 * 8) * Fruit: forestry/extratrees fruit trees
 * 9) * Leaves: leaves
 * 10) * Mystical: Botania mystical flowers (grows)
 * 11) * Redstone: redstone torch
 * 12) * Rocks: cobblestone, stone, stone bricks
 * 13) * Saplings: forestry/extratrees saplings
 * 14) * Reeds: sugarcane (grows taller)
 * 15) * Lily Pads: lilly pads
 * 16) * Wood: wood
 * 17) * Cacti: cacti (grows taller)
 * 18) * End: dragon egg
 * 19) * Gourds: pumpkin and melon stems
 * 20) * Jungle: vines and ferns
 * 21) * Mushroom: red/brown mushroom
 * 22) * Nether: netherwart
 * 23) * Snow: flowers, but will make snow (?)
 * 24) * Flowers: vanilla / Biome o' Plenty flowers (spreads)
 * 25) * Wheat: wheat
 * 26) * Node: tc node
 * 27) * Thaumic Flowers: cinderpearl/shimmerleaf (spreads)
 * 28) Fertility: 1-4; number of drones produced as offspring.  I had a dream where this went up to 16 once, but that's not real and can't hurt you.
 * 29) Territory: area bee will look for flowers and pollinate/do its effect
 * 30) * Average (9x6x9)
 * 31) * Large (11x8x11)
 * 32) * Largest (15x13x15)
 * Notice that some frames modify this. The alveary also doubles it.  The area bees pollinate forestry/extratrees trees and spread flowers if applicable is exactly 3x larger.  So you generally want this to be "Average" to reduce lag, but it isn't a big deal.  If you have a bee with a harmful effect that you have to use and you want to mitigate it (ie radioactive bee line), use an alveary with a couple electrical simulators with tin tubes.
 * 1) Effect: what it do
 * 2) Climate/Tolerance: there are 5 climates in increasing order of temperature:
 * 3) * Icy (t≤0)
 * 4) * Cold (0<t≤35)
 * 5) * Normal (35<t≤85)
 * 6) * Warm (85<t≤100)
 * 7) * Hot (100<t)
 * 8) * Hellish (only if the biome is a nether biome) (blazing electron tube is currently bugged)
 * Tolerances are counted in number of levels, eg Icy up to Hellish is 5 levels. On the other hand, alveary upgrades (and iapiary upgrades) modify the climate by a number of percentage points, so you could need a whole lot to change the climate a lot.
 * 1) Humidity/Tolerance: there are 3 humidities in increasing order:
 * 2) * Arid (h<30)
 * 3) * Normal (30≤h≤85)
 * 4) * Damp (85<h)
 * Yes, 30 really is considered Normal and not Arid, this is forestry being inconsistent, not me making a mistake.
 * 1) Diurnal: Can the bee work during the day
 * 2) Nocturnal: Can the bee work at night
 * 3) Tolerant Flyer: Can the bee work while it is raining
 * 4) Cave Dwelling: Can solid blocks be placed over the bee's housing.

= Appendix: Effects =

Notes on nodes:
 * Each node has a brightness (fading, pale, normal, or bright)
 * Each node has a type (Tainted, Pure, Hungry, Sinister, Unstable, or Normal)
 * There is no way to make nodes Sinister or Unstable with Magic Bees, you will need to use the Thaumic Bases Node Manipulator
 * The Type-Changing effects are bugged to work faster than intended. They will try to affect all nodes in range instead of being throttled.

Sources:
 * [FTB Wiki]
 * [Forestry]
 * [ExtraBees effects]
 * [Magic Bees effects]

= Appendix: Frames = There are two types of frames: GT++ frames, which CANNOT be repaired (so only use them if you can afford to autocraft them or don't mind that they have limited uses), and forestry/extratrees/magicbees frames which can be repaired.

Most of the magic bees frames are way too expensive to make even one of and so are effectively loot only.

Some frames have caps, but remember that these are only checked per apiary/frame housing, so having multiple frame housings in an alveary ignores the caps.

= Appendix: Hive Spawns and Drops =

Hive Drops
When a hive is broken, it shuffles its drop list, then rolls for a princess, drone, and combs. The drop list is a list of bee genomes, combs/extra drops, and chances, included in the following table. When selecting a drop, it tries them in whatever order they shuffled to, returning the current one with its given probability and otherwise skipping it. For princesses, if it goes over the whole list without dropping a princess, it will try again, up to 10 times. For drones/combs, if it goes over the whole list without dropping one, you just don't get one.

This means for most hives, you have about a 97.77% chance of a main species princess for the hive, and 2.23% of a valiant princess. For drones, you have 78.8% of a main species drone, 1.18% of a valiant drone, and 19.4% of no drone.

For Forest hives, you have about 92.10% of a regular forest princess, 5.72% of a tolerant flyer forest princess, and 2.12% of a valiant princess. For drones, you have about 75.66% of a regular forest drone, 4.74% of a tolerant flyer forest drone, 1.74% of a valiant drone, and 17.848% of no drone.

Extra Bees hives and Magic Bees Oblivion hives always give pristine princesses.

Extra Bees hives are currently bugged to only roll for the princess once. and to always give pristine princesses.

Magic Bees Infernal and Oblivion hives can drop Steadfast instead of Valiant!

Hive Generation
Forestry hives generate in biomes where the main species could tolerate the climate, either on top of specific blocks or in trees. They generate in all dimensions besides the nether, with some (ender) having further dimension restrictions.

Extra Bees hives have several differences with their generation. They try to generate 2 each chunk between y=20 and y=69. They ignore climate restrictions and have different restrictions on their physical surroundings.

Extra Bees Marble hives are unused.

Magic Bees hives have some extra spawning conditions, and some ignore climate.

Hive Table
Sources:
 * [Forestry hive spawning]
 * [Forestry hive drops]
 * [ExtraBees]
 * [|Magic Bees hive spawning]
 * [Magic Bees hive drops]