Bees

Welcome to Moron's guide to bees! There are much better guides to bee breeding out there. This primer is intended to guide first time apiarists just enough that they can get past the start.

Bee Mechanics

Basic Breeding

Place a princess and a drone together in any bee housing (apiary, bee house, etc) with a nearby flower. This will begin filling up the bar on the left. After the bar is full, the princess will be converted to a queen.

Now the bar will begin ticking down from full slowly.

This is the "alive" phase of the bee. While alive, a bee will do the following things:

1. Spread additional flowers in its territory at a speed based on its pollination trait.
2. Apply other special effects - for example, "aggressive" trait bees will damage anything within their territory.

You can track the exact progress using NEI - it will show the "work progress" when you look at the bee housing. (Sometimes this number will skip back a couple times when it reaches 95% - not sure why).

After the progress bar is complete, the queen will produce a bunch of outputs on the right. These are:

1. Between zero and one princess. If the queen was "pristine" (you can see with mouse hover + shift after scanning), it will always produce one princess. If the queen was "ignoble" and the generation stat is too high, plus you get unlucky, it will produce zero princesses (otherwise one).'
2. Between one and four drones based on the "fertility" trait of the bee.
3. Species-specific outputs. For example, Majestic bees have a 30% chance of generating a Dripping Comb, which can be centrifuged into honey.

Checking Traits

You may have noticed me referring to bee "traits" multiple times. When you find a bee in the wild or after breeding, it will simply display "unknown genome".

To get the traits for a bee, it must be scanned. There are many ways to achieve this.

1. If you are pre-polyethylene (before MV) but have steel, you can make a Field Kit and use paper to scan bees. This will not show all traits, but it will be enough for most purposes. It will also allow you to use mouse hover + shift to see stats in your inventory.
2. Once you have polyethylene, you can make a Beealyzer. When you input honey, it will show every trait of the bee, including dominant/recessive traits and special effects. Page one has most of the relevant stats for production output:
3. Page two has all of the "picky" requirements of the bee, which will be described in detail later:

Help, my queen won't do anything!

Bees are picky and have requirements you need to satisfy. Specifically,

1. The sky must be visible (unless it has the "cave dwelling" trait).
2. It must be the right time of the day (day for diurnal, night for nocturnal).
3. It must not be raining (unless it has the "tolerant flier" trait).
4. The climate stats must be correct for the bee's tolerances.

Issues will be shown on the left side of the bee housing you place the queen in. For example, this Wintry bee is unhappy with the current climate.

Climate Details

Here is the beealyzer output for the "Scholarly" bee:

Or in a more concise form (from mouse hover + shift):

Climate is split into two parts: temperature and humidity. These can take on six values for temperature and three values for humidity.

For temperature, in decreasing order:

1. Hellish (this can only occur in nether biomes)
2. Hot
3. Warm
4. Normal
5. Cold
6. Icy

And for humidity, in decreasing order:

1. Damp
2. Normal
3. Arid

Tolerance (eg. "Up 1" or "Both 3") means that the bee will still live if the stats are higher or lower than its base stats. For the Scholarly drone, it can tolerate anywhere from Hot to Normal Temperature, but it cannot tolerate anything other than Arid Humidity.

Climate traits come from the biome the bee housing is placed in. They can be viewed in the top right corner of the bee housing. In the plains biome this is Normal/Normal. (Note that the temperature also decreases with height in the world.)

So our Scholarly bee will not be happy in a Plains biome. What to do then? You can always search for another biome using the Biome Compass, but this is not always practical due to long distances and need for item transport.

You can control the climate stats locally after getting an Alveary (a 3x4x3 multi you can build in MV/HV).

1. The Alveary Hygroregulator (sic) can control the Humidity Stat. Supplying a constant flow of water will increase humidity and decrease temperature slightly, and supplying a constant flow of lava will decrease humidity and increase temperature slightly.
2. The Alveary Heater and Alveary Fan can control the temperature (fan for decreasing heat). Both of these require RF as an input, so this can be fed directly with wires, or mediated through an Alveary Transmission, which powers everything in the Alveary multiblock.

After reaching IV, you can make Industrial Apiary upgrades which allow you to directly control humidity and temperature:

Other Stats

While I could list every stat range here, it would greatly inflate the article length. So I recommend checking out the wiki pages here instead:

https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Bee_Attributes

Here is a short guide to the traits you want to maximize:

1. Lifespan: Shortest

Finding bees

The best time to find bee hives in the wild is during the twilight periods of dawn/dusk, or at night. Hives put out light, and are easily visible. Some gather surface hives by using a copter jetpack to hover over an area, marking the bee hive locations, and returning during the day.

Rock hives are pretty frequent in stone, and you'll find plenty during vein-searching and clearing.

Some hives are only found deep underground under certain biomes. Search deep rock in magical forest or other biomes for them. (note: add list of hives found underground and which biomes have them) If you happen to run into redstone ore or glowstone, there might be a hive located in the center.

Finding biomes

Tropical hives can be difficult to locate since vanilla jungle biomes aren't included. Use a Natura Compass to examine biomes, and try to select biomes that are tagged as JUNGLE in Biomes o Plenty

https://github.com/Glitchfiend/BiomesOPlenty/blob/BOP-for-1.6/src/main/java/biomesoplenty/core/BOPBiomes.java#L321 https://www.reddit.com/r/biomesoplenty/comments/1ueued/request_list_of_forge_biome_dictionary_tags/

Checking temperature/humidity

Your local biome's temperature and humidity is reported in the apiary window, top right. If you want to know the temp/humidity in a biome that you are standing in and don't have/don't want to carry a habitat locator, you can use NEI to look up the habitat locator, as it reports your current climate and humidity in it's tooltip.

Breeding

To create a queen, one princess and one drone have to be inserted into some sort of bee housing. A queen produces species-dependent produce while alive and offspring upon death.

Princesses

When a queen dies, it produces either one or zero princesses:

• Ignoble princesses will breed fine for a hundred times, after which they have a small chance of producing no princesses. This chance can be reduced with frames (lower genetic decay = better).
• Pristine princesses always produce one princess.

Pristine princesses are obviously preferred (And all rock princesses are pristine princesses, so definitely harvest all rock hives), but that doesn't mean ignoble princesses are worthless. It only takes about 10 generations to change the species of a princess, and ignoble princesses do not decay until at least 100 generations have passed. This makes them useful for crossbreeding since you can quickly expand the number of princesses you have trying for a mutation.

Drones

When a queen dies it produces an amount of drones equal to it's fertility stat. Most bee species have a fertility of 2.

Homes for your bees

Bee Houses

Bee Houses are the tier 0 bee breeding machines. They do not attach to pipes of any kind, they do not allow the use of frames, and they do not allow mutations of the bees inside them.

Apiaries

Apiaries are the tier 1 bee breeding machines. They allow pipes to be connected to collect inputs and output, allowed for automation. Apiaries also for mutations, making them the best block to progress down the bee breeding trees. Apiaries are the first tier to accept frames which modify bee breeding behaviors in various ways.

These are gated behind the carpenter, but if you stumble onto a forestry villager he might trade one over for some vanilla logs.

Tools for the beekeeper

Field Kit

This tool allows you to scan bees very early on for the cost of a bit of paper per bee. You don't get quite the level of detail as you would with a beealyzer, but it's enough to breed with. If you're stubborn and want to breed bees in the steam age, enjoy.

Getting Started

Breeding Fodder

Autobreeder setup, with a hopper under the apiary

The first addition you'll want for your new beekeeper hobby is a stock of drones to breed with. Typically it's good practice to stock up on drones for each new breed you obtain, starting with the Mundane bees.

Bees found in hives within the world will already be pure, so you can set up a loop to autobreed them straight away (Think hopper or conveyor pulling from apiary and pushing back into the apiary with GT pipes)

Converting Princesses

Need some spare princesses to try breeding a new species with? You can convert your extra mundane bees to a new species pretty easily with that stock of drones you've got. Sticking an unwanted princess into an autobreeder with a stack of drones will eventually convert that princess to the same breed as the drones. This can take between 5 and 10 generations, you can tell when it has merged to the drone variant when only stackable drones are produced. Don't be stingy on the drone quantity though, or you will get deviated species mixed in.

Beginning to Breed

All bee combinations are listed in NEI, simply search up the bee you're looking to breed and trace back to he bees you have available.

When targeting a new species, it's a good idea to convert some new princesses to the two parents before starting. if you want to breed some industrious bees, convert 3 or 4 new princesses to diligent and 3 or 4 to unweary. Then place each diligent princess with an unweary drone and each unweary princess with a diligent drone, at first it's probably best to not automate this. Rinse and repeat this process making sure that each resulting princess gets placed with the other style drone. When you begin to see Industrious bees pop up, save those and try to pair them with another industrious. If you're using the field kit scan and look to see if any bees have industrious as their recessive species, this makes it easier to target a full industrious bee.

Once you have an Industrious/Industrious drone and an Industrious/Industrious princess, then move to the autobreeder and try to get a drone stack going. This typically will be done in an autobreeder. Set this up and wait. Look for stacking drones and feed them into the autobreeder to try and stabilize the queen, consider feeding the unstacking drones to the earlier extra unweary and diligent princesses you started with.

Comb calculation

Normal vanilla Forestry had a very simple equation to calculate what your final comb chance would be. Every 550ticks (27.5 seconds), a bee has a chance to produce their comb. This chance is represented in NEI. To account for Production Modifier and Bee speed, it used to be

P(X) = Bee Speed x Production Modifier x Comb Chance.

However, that didn't allow for proper scaling in GTNH and thus, we use another, *little* bit more complicated formula:

${\displaystyle \left(1+{\frac {t}{6}}\right)\cdot \left(\left(x\right)^{\frac {1}{2}}\right)\cdot 2\left(1+s\right)+p^{\left(x^{\frac {1}{3}}\right)}-3}$

where t is the tier of the machine (ULV =0, LV=1, MV=2...)

where s is the bee speed (see chart on the right)

where p is the production modifier. p/4 for frames and 0.25*Amount of production upgrades in iApiary. So p=2 for iApiary max.

Be aware that the fastest speed as of now in GTNH is blinding. Additional speeds will be added later.

However, the chance of a comb may never exceed 100% in the Apiary and the Alveary. Additionally, Apiary and Alveary will have the cap of t=1 as well as iApiary being t=8. This cap is removed in the new Apiary Multiblock Industrial Apicultural Aclimatiser And Drone Domestication Station. Neither will it limit comb chances to 100% (both iApiary and mApiary), nor will it have a capped tier. It will scale with the amount of Voltage you give it.

Notes

• Some bees do not allow certain traits. For example, lich queens will never have diurnal, and will only work at night.