Bees, Beekeeping, and Beelieving

[Christian Crusader]

Recently have been dipping my toes into bee keeping after getting into the iron age thought I certainly have done is sooner. Though nine in game days (currently November) have passed from me placing the skeps under the bee hives and placing upwards of 10+ flowers around each one, not a single bee has decided to inhabit my home for them. The bees are fairly far away from my home and are not loaded in by distance if that piece of information helps. A few questions to assist me in the future:

- Is there a distance bees need to be loaded in for them to inhabit a skep?
- Do bees have preferences over some kinds of flowers compared to others?
- Does weather/season effect if the bees decide to be in a skep?
- Do the bees just personally hate me?
 

[Thorfinn]

They can take a while. The most important variable is supposed to be number of flowers within 7 tiles in any direction. But that is now capped -- I'm not sure what the formula is, but I've seen both capped at 64 and capped at 35, no matter how many flowers are in range. I assume number of skeps is still a part of the formula, but I'm starting to think that adjustment is POST cap, so putting more than one empty skep in range slows things down. From experience, it appears to be by a lot, much more than the 3 it used to be.

I'm not convinced the Wiki still has correct information. I didn't see anything there about what appears to be a hard cap, and I've spent several days in early game next to a large pop wild hive with 35 flowers, and it never gave the message that they would swarm. The Wiki suggests that they should swarm in under a day, but that's not what I'm seeing.

[Christian Crusader]

2 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

They can take a while. The most important variable is supposed to be number of flowers within 7 tiles in any direction. But that is now capped -- I'm not sure what the formula is, but I've seen both capped at 64 and capped at 35, no matter how many flowers are in range. I assume number of skeps is still a part of the formula, but I'm starting to think that adjustment is POST cap, so putting more than one empty skep in range slows things down. From experience, it appears to be by a lot, much more than the 3 it used to be.

I'm not convinced the Wiki still has correct information. I didn't see anything there about what appears to be a hard cap, and I've spent several days in early game next to a large pop wild hive with 35 flowers, and it never gave the message that they would swarm. The Wiki suggests that they should swarm in under a day, but that's not what I'm seeing.

If the Wiki or in-game guide to Animal Husbandry doesn't have the correct information does that mean things aren't working as intended for the bees to inhabit the skeps? Have bees, in the most recent update, broke or aren't working as intended?

[Thorfinn]

The in-game handbook is probably right.

Bees eventually work. It's just wild hives sometimes take forever. Once you get your first domesticated skep, everything seems to go the same as the Wiki, except that flowers are capped. Which is for the good. In 1.17, you could set up hives that would be harvestable almost immediately.

[Ashery]

If it's November, it may be too late to get bees setup on account of the low temperatures.

[Thorfinn]

I was wondering the same, but that's always in the spring, and default start. Not sure whether I'm far enough from snow, but I can see glacier ice within 256 blocks.

For whatever reason, this time the wild hive is seeing 77 flowers that I had in by late 3 MAY, it's now early 7 MAY, still no block info about swarming.

[Christian Crusader]

Sounds like the solution you're all narrowing towards is waiting longer according to the bee keeping chart in the Wiki and if that doesn't work see if it'll work once Spring comes around?

[Thorfinn]

It populated by June 1. Don't know how warm it was there. Probably around 2000 north of spawn.

I created a new shortcut to the exe, just in case I messed up a config or something, and bees seem to be working more or less OK. Wild hives still seem a bit slow, but everything else is working fine. In my apiary, they are showing 228 flowers, or whatever the number is. Now end of June and I have almost a full barrel of honey, so doesn't seem much has changed

[LJim]

Temperature/season definitely has an impact on bees. If it's in November and temp's too cold, then that will inhibit bees from populating skeps. 

[Thorfinn]

12 hours ago, LJim said:

Temperature/season definitely has an impact on bees. If it's in November and temp's too cold, then that will inhibit bees from populating skeps. 

That's probably true if you find them too early, too. I take it if the night temp dips too low, it won't do anything that day? So if you don't check early enough on the first day the nighttime temperature was above that minimum value, and you have a stack or more flowers around them, you won't see the message since it would say, "Will swarm in 4 hours"?

I'm just guessing, trying to come up with a reason why I would not see any message at all, and then suddenly all three wild hives would swarm the same day.

[Christian Crusader]

I believe that season/temperature does have an effect on how the bee's populate skeps because of the messages that are supposed to be shown. On my Vanilla world, no mods, or changes to the base experience there's no message which displays "Will swarm." It is currently February and the snow is starting to melt around my house. Once it turns Spring I will check on the skeps once again to be sure.

[Maelstrom]

I will confirm that when bees are dormant due to low temps, no message will display except population size and if there's honey to be harvested.  I believe the hive's population drops to poor when it goes dormant.

[Thorfinn]

Oh, well that's not the issue on early wild bees, then. Last night I had a day 1 find, and it had a large population, so I added flowers until they saw 84, placed an empty skep, then bided my time in the general area with charcoal and clay until day 4. Still no message when I quit and headed to bed.

[Thorfinn]

Hey, just broke my previous record. First hive before 9AM, 1 MAY. Gonna have to build a platform for flowers. Looks to be 9-10 blocks off the ground.

[EDIT]

Wild Beehive (Medium) Large population 9 flowers (there's a few lilies of the valley on a slope that must be close enough to count.)

[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]

Wow. Second beehive, also medium with large population, 26 nearby flowers, 11:02 AM, 1 MAY. Guess I'll leave the flowers I was planning to harvest...

[/EDIT2]

[EDIT3]

The first is seeing 41 flowers, and swarmed by 6 AM on 3 MAY. The second is seeing 83 flowers, and still has no swarm information. I don't know how it works. Though I did see a night time temperature of 6 degrees on the second one, while I saw a low of 8 on the first. But the terrain between the two is awful, so it takes a good hour to traverse, so I never saw either at its lowest, probably.

What did confuse me a bit because I kept hearing buzzing when I didn't think I was close enough was that there was a third hive between the two...

[/EDIT3]

Edited June 27, 2023 by Thorfinn

[Christian Crusader]

Solution:

In the current version of 1.18.5 (Stable) requirements to tame bees while temperatures are low or snow is around, are as follows: The outside temperature must be above -5*C, the date should be March 5th (when I saw the "ready to swarm" message) or when snow melt is visible (encase people are using different than 9 standard days per month), and the skep has to be within three blocks of the wild hive and surrounded by flowers (the more the better but there is a cap of 100?).

Answers to my questions at the start of the thread:
- No the bees do not have to be loaded in visually for the skep to be inhabited.
- There is no difference between using flowers as of current version, only in model.
- Yes, bees will not swarm during cold seasons only during Spring, Summer, and Early Fall. Rain does not effect bees swarming skeps.
- No they love me.

Possible solution to low temperature environments (Not tested):

- Moving towards the equator of the world to get warmer temperatures.

- Building a small greenhouse (search it up in the wiki) around the wild beehive and doing said requirements.

[Thorfinn]

17 hours ago, Christian Crusader said:

and the skep has to be within three blocks of the wild hive and surrounded by flowers (the more the better but there is a cap of 100?).

Interesting information. I have not tried much more than a stack of flowers around a wild hive in 1.18, but good to know the distance limit from swarming skep to populated skep is 3. Is that true in the apiary, too? If you use Wiki's layout, once all the skeps around a given skep are populated, there's no point in not harvesting the one in the center, even if it's large, and you still have open skeps, but they are more than 3 away? Or would it make more sense to relocate that skep to somewhere there are empty skeps nearby?

[Maelstrom]

7 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

the distance limit from swarming skep to populated skep is 3. Is that true in the apiary, too?

Correct.  I usually build an apiary in modules of 3x3 skep layout.  Harvest the perimeter skeps so the central one can repopulate the harvested skeps.  Once one of the perimeter skeps is populated, harvest the central skep.

I typically have skeps pinging 120-160 flowers but those produce as quickly as skeps with 95-100 flowers.

[Thorfinn]

I usually use 6xn and harvest alternate rows. The center ones in the Wiki structure were pinging 224, if memory serves. My build from last night, the central ones were pinging 450.

Some mechanics I noticed (assuming I can read my chicken scratching)

• The skep counts the number of flowers in its range one game hour after the skep placed. It appears to report what the Wiki says in terms of swarm time.
• There is no difference in how the skep populates -- it looks to be strictly based on number of flowers. I don't remember any cases where it was less than large, even out at the margins of the field where they were seeing ~160 flowers. Possibly I wasn't paying enough attention, between collecting reeds and flowers. But placed by itself out in several random natural flowerbeds, you can get poor initial population.
• At 350 flowers, it was taking 1:10 to swarm. Somewhere between 450 and 500 flowers, (no, I don't know exactly) it will swarm exactly a game hour later. That appears to be the minimum time. At least at 675 flowers, it also took exactly an hour. (Yes, it takes a couple days dedicated just to harvesting flowers to do that.) Very much a case of diminishing returns.
• The skep will not be able to swarm again for what appears to be a full game day. Maybe more. There may be an RNG involved, or it may be a stronger function of number of skeps in range. But you can reset the timer by transferring the populated skep to your backpack slot and then putting it back, just as you would suspect. Maybe what I should do is reset the counters on symmetrical skeps and see if I can tell whether there's RNG Or maybe I should leave that as an exercise for the reader.
• Harvestable is a much slower operation, and appears to either have a large degree of RNG involved, or maybe it's that skeps figure in more strongly than 3x, or maybe I just am not understanding my notes. It does not appear to be the strong function of number of flowers it used to be. It's much slower. Not that bad of a problem -- it's still faster than I can harvest reeds or use up the honey.
• Flowers up to 5 blocks above the skep are counted. Those 6 above are not.

[Thorfinn]

Huh. Wiki is not quite right. The box that the flowers have to be in to be counted is 8 blocks north and 8 blocks west of the hive, and 7 blocks south and 7 blocks east of the hive, that is, it is a block 16 on a side. That means a hive can potentially see 256 flowers from a single plane if you hang the hives from a trellis above. Which is convenient, in that with a 4-high trellis (or, heck, just a block hanging in space) you no longer have to fence out coons and bears, nor do you have to dodge around whatever pillars you are using when collecting drops.

That means all my earlier testing, which was based on a 7 block radius is not quite right, since only values of the central 4 hives remain the same. All the rest, 32 in total, are non-symmetrical in the apiary. Or more correctly, the axis of symmetry runs on the NW-SE diagonal. Easy to fix, though. Just add an extra row of flowers on the north and west sides if it matters to you. [EDIT] Never mind. No matter what you do, because the block of flowers has diagonal symmetry about the hive, the tiled pattern will also have diagonal symmetry. [/EDIT] But practically speaking, it works out really close because even the worst corner, the northwest one, which was only seeing 100 flowers, swarmed in only a little more than an hour.

I don't yet know about honey. I don't think I'll probably bother. It's done when it's done.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

Incidentally, just noticed that in the new version, flowers are only detected Z+5 to Z-5 from the hive. I'm pretty sure it used to be +/-7, or possibly 8 for one of them, again to get a s=16 cube. But that's why some of the wild hives high in the tree see no flowers.