Honey farming is the process of collecting honey bottles and honeycombs from beehives and bee nests. Unlike normal farming, keeping a bee farm is rather complicated - inexperienced players can kill all the bees if they are not careful. In this article, Gurugamer is going to showcase a complete guide to keeping bees and farming honey in Minecraft 1.19.
1. How to obtain bees in Minecraft?
Find & Obtain bee nests
The first step to begin keeping bees is to find bees in your world. Initially, players need to find a naturally generated bee nest. Naturally generated bee nests have 3 bees in them.
| Biome | Chance | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| JE | BE | ||
| Meadow | |||
| Plains Sunflower plains |
|||
| Mangrove Swamp | 5% | 4% | |
| Flower forest | 2% | 3% | |
| Forest Birch forest Old growth birch forest |
0.2% | 0.035% | |
This is the hardest step, as outside of a meadow biome, bee nests only have a 5% chance to generate on an oak or birch tree when that tree grows near flowers. However, they also generate after world generation so players would find them eventually.
Afterward, players need to break the nest with a silk touch tool to move it. All bees currently in the nest would stay inside. Bee returns to the nest at night or when it is raining so players should break them at this particular time. Keep in mind that breaking a bee nest without Silk Touch would not drop anything and all the bees would attack you. Aside from the damage and hazard, they would all die.
If you don't have silk touch, you must wait for the bee nest to reach honey level 5 (the nest would change appearance). Use shear on it to harvest 3 honeycombs, which in turn can be crafted into a beehive. Put a campfire 4-5 blocks under the nest to prevent the bee from getting angry.
2. How to create a honey farm in Minecraft?
It is fairly straightforward to create a bee farm - just place a bee nest or bee hive, put flowers around it, then wait. Below is how you can improve the production scale.
Breed bees
Bees can be lured (and bred) using any type of flower (including 2-block flowers and wither roses), and can also be moved using leads. If you feed the bees the flowers, they enter love mode and breed, producing a baby bee. This replenishes the bee population, allowing players to increase the size of the farm.
Create beehives
Players can craft beehives using 6 planks and 3 honeycombs, which can be acquired from normal bee nests. As mentioned above, they need to wait for the nest to get to level 5 before using the campfire and shear to harvest. Beehives and bee nests are identical in function - just repeat the process to create as many bee hives as needed.
Beehives differ from natural bee nests in that the hive can be harvested without Silk Touch (but any bees within, or flying nearby, must be placated).
Improving bees efficiency
As bees only work during the day without any rain, players can improve the efficiency of your bees by relocating them to the Nether or the End. Neither dimension experiences weather or daylight cycles, which force bees to work whenever possible. To improve the efficiency of the bees' work, place flowers near the hive so they can gather pollen and return to their hive as quickly as possible.
3. Harvesting bee products
Players need to wait for the hive honey level to get to 5. Once it's full, the hive changes its appearance to show honey oozing out and, if the block below it isn't a full solid block, starts dripping honey particles. This means the nest is ready for harvest.
- To harvest honeycomb, the player uses shears on the nest or hive, causing it to drop three honeycomb items. After harvesting, the hive or nest is reset to empty (honey level 0, with the default appearance).
- To harvest honey, the player uses a glass bottle on the nest or hive; the bottle then becomes a honey bottle.
The best way to harvest a bee hive/nest is to use a redstone dispenser containing either a glass bottle or shears. This allows players to get honeycombs without the bees getting angry. Otherwise, they need to harvest manually with a campfire and shear.
4. How to use honeycomb and honey?
The main resources you get from bee nests are honeycomb and honey, which have a number of uses:
Honey bottles
Honey is a great remedy for poison. Unlike milk, they do not remove other buffs or debuffs. They can be crafted into sugar or honey blocks. Honey blocks are sticky transparent blocks that can slow entities, similar to soul sand and slime block. They also reduce fall damage by 80% and drag along adjacent blocks + creatures when moved by pistons.
Honeycombs
Honeycombs are usually used to duplicate bee hives. Four honeycombs can be crafted into a honeycomb block, which is mainly used for decoration. Additionally, honeycombs can also be used to make candles and to preserve copper blocks from (further) oxidation.
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