Am I doing something wrong? (beekeeping)

[ArgentumVir]

I'm starting to think there's a bug here, but I can't seem to get this hive to swarm. This empty skep (seen below the hive in the screenie) has been sitting here for several in-game days now in this position. Before I moved it there it had been sitting right below the hive on a large platform. I was under the impression that a large pop wild hive would move in after a while, and the block info would update as soon as it decided if it wanted to swarm. Just seems pretty weird because I was watching a guide and did almost exactly what he did and his hive swarmed pretty quickly. The only difference between his hive and mine is that his was a large hive not a medium one.

Spoiler

[ArgentLuna]

Have you filled the area around it with flowers? That will speed up the process greatly. 

I got one the other day and with 92 flowers places around it i had it full in a day.

 

Edited July 24 by ArgentLuna

[ArgentumVir]

14 minutes ago, ArgentLuna said:

Have you filled the area around it with flowers? That will speed up the process greatly. 

I got one the other day and with 92 flowers places around it i had it full in a day.

 

Good question. They finally migrated but I have no idea what changed. I did plop a few more flowers around, it registered about 80 but the wiki says 22+ is already the quickest it can take to swarm. It's the second day of September and I dropped the skep down earlyish to mid June. Basically 2 weeks have passed. Definitely seems like twice as long as the guy I watched.

[Streetwind]

It used to take 4-5 days every time. Recently it was adjusted so that it can happen more quickly - but only "can", not "will". If it takes a couple days, it takes a couple days.

[Thorfinn]

I have not figured out the rule on when the wild hive recalculates swarming when you place more flowers. Like @Streetwind says, I'm not sure it always does recalculate. In the current game, I placed more than 2 full stacks of flowers in range of one that said it had 20-some originally, and then built a couple fairly small charcoal pits (3x3x2 and 3x3x3) and the wild hive still had no message, but it had registered all the flowers. Built a pretty large (6x6x4) charcoal pit, figuring the skep would be populated by the time I was done. Nope. But at least it gave me the message it would be less than a day. May 6th, it finally popped. I had time to collect all the charcoal pits I had built, though I left several stacks in firepits for later retrieval because I could not carry that many stacks of charcoal, only having 2 linen sacks and one hand basket at the time.

[Michael Gates]

In my current world, I found a beehive that was so far up in a tree that the ground was out of range! I had to build a dirt platform about four squares in the air and cover THAT with flowers before the bees would deign to notice them. Then I just expanded it to be my apiary, more skeps and flowers and some steps up the side.

Edited August 7 by Michael Gates

[Maelstrom]

I had a couple of hives so high in pine trees that I didn't even know they were there until I was surprised to suddenly have some honeycomb appear in my inventory when clearing some pine trees just 50 blocks from my home.  This after I had wandered 2,000 blocks to find the closest hive.

[Thorfinn]

That's easy to have happen, even with Buzzwords. An IRL month or so ago, I found one by sound alone and stood directly under it for about 1 game hour just to make sure, and Buzzwords never popped up. Found out you can hear it from 32 blocks below (Z=128 and Z=160), while Buzzwords was, IIRC, 11.

Ran into one of those a couple IRL days back, and while I was building a platform for flowers, saw a second hive probably 20 blocks away, but also way high in the treetops. Bees are a whole lot more common than I used to think.

[EDIT]

But they are often fiendishly difficult to hear over the rain or even a moderate breeze. Even knowing exactly where it was, I failed to distinguish it in a high wind.

[/EDIT]

Edited August 7 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

18 hours ago, Michael Gates said:

In my current world, I found a beehive that was so far up in a tree that the ground was out of range! I had to build a dirt platform about four squares in the air and cover THAT with flowers before the bees would deign to notice them. Then I just expanded it to be my apiary, more skeps and flowers and some steps up the side.

If it's in a good location, (close to somewhere you can farm, for example) that's actually a great way to go. Just build the platform 4 or more tiles above the ground, attach the skeps to the underside of the platform in the standard 2x2, and then then you can clear all the undergrowth on the ground (no flowers!) and make it very difficult NOT to find all the drops, because you basically have a flat billiard table for them to fall on.

In survival, you can make the platform with medium fert for the tiles you want the skeps, and low fert everywhere else, and make it easy to figure out where you should replace them from below after harvest. On Wilderness, use cobblestone and packed dirt as a base, add soil on top, then flowers.

[Maelstrom]

Pretty hard to do that with the "dirt wants to kill you" setting; i.e. soil instability ON.

[Thorfinn]

Right. Which is why on wilderness, you have to make the platform out of packed earth (or, as I recommend, packed earth and cobblestone) then top it with dirt of whatever flavor is handy.

[Maelstrom]

So there's two block of air between the ground and the cobble foundation, soil on top of the foundation and then flowers on the soil and the skeps are hunger under the foundation in the 2 blocks of air?

[Thorfinn]

When I build that way, I leave 4 blocks of air at the bottom. 2 blocks of air means the skeps prevent you from moving freely through the space. 3 blocks is fine, but a little more difficult to get a good angle on seeing the yellow door (harvestable) as you run through. 5 is a bit much, but 4 seems to be Goldilocks for me. YMMV. The rest of your description, spot on.