Bad Beehaviour
Part 48 ~ 9 August 2025
Posted: 25 March 2026
My bees, my bees, oh where could they be?
Did my horses eat them? Did they drown in the river? Did they bug out of reality? It's more likely than you think. You know, for a mob that was the mascot for a bugfix update, these things sure are buggy...
The tooltip says there's no bees, and so does the extra HUD info from MiniHUD. But these have misled me in the past. There's only one way to know for sure: *break the hive*. After putting it in containment, of course.
Welp. They really are gone :( Thankfully, I know a place with a healthy population of pollinators: Floral Paradise.
I arrived in the afternoon, and when night fell I noticed something strange going on: some of the bees were staying out. Did these guys lose their way home? Are there just too many bees for the available nests? Whatever the cause, they need a new home, and I'm happy to provide. They don't know it yet, but their new home will be a farm on the nether roof. Is that better than being homeless?
Buzzing between the treetops to avoid the monsters, I scoured the woods for more hiveless souls. They were EVERYWHERE. I spent the whole night scooping up bees, ending up with eight hives and two nests full.
On the way back, I spotted some stray bees over the birch plantation. (I'd earlier harvested this area for charcoal.) On closer inspection, I noticed something off: this bee was carrying pollen, and had 7/10 HP. I checked the nearby forests and found more similarly pollinated and damaged bees. WHAT COULD IT MEAN? Well, I rembember from my time at the stable that the bees would sometimes take damage from swimming in the river. ARE THESE MY BEES? They're HUNDREDS of blocks from the stable. WHAT ARE THEY DOING ALL THE WAY OVER HERE?
This reminded me of a server that I played on when 1.15 (the bee update) first came out. Bee nests were way rarer back then, and we had a small world size, maybe 5000 blocks in each direction. We found a bee nest towards the northwest corner of the world; the bees had already wandered away to the north but we managed to track down two of them and take them back to base and breed up a population. I knew they generate in threes though, so I got curious and went searching for the last one... and I found it. AT THE WORLD BORDER. If not for that magical wall, it'd still be wandering to this day.
So yeah. If I want these things to work for me, I'm gonna have to put them on a tighter leash. And a stricter schedule! That brings us to the aforementioned nether roof farm. But first, a quick test run in the comfort of my base.
Bee-eautiful! No escapees, no bugs in the system other than the bees themselves, just smooth honeycomb production. I went netherside, rode the hellevator, and set up two modules of the honeycomb farm. I decided to put these in the chunks near my main portal so they'd be loaded in whenever I go to the nether. Like the sheep farm, these dispensers are stocked with the fancy unbreaking shears so they will last FOREVER.
I then went over to the adjacent chunk and built a copy of ianxofour's honey farm. The Stackwell Curse bit again, as my bottles are stuck in the hopper until I collect 731. But on the upside, I never need to worry about running out of space for input or output – I can just add a ton of bottles to any of the droppers and they'll make their own way around the system!
This pair of pollen-processing powerhouses is gonna keep me stocked with bee byproduct forever more – as long as I hang around this area of the nether. Good thing, then, that I have more plans for this region, both inside and topside. The future is sweet!
