Mastering Minecraft: How to Build a Beehive with Bees in Just a Few Simple Steps

Are you a Minecraft player looking to add bees to your world? In this article, we will explore everything you need to know about bees in Minecraft, including how to obtain them and attract them to your beehives.

We will cover everything from finding a beehive or bee nest to the benefits and risks of having bees. If you’re ready to dive into the world of Minecraft bees, keep reading to learn more!

What is Minecraft?

Minecraft is a computer game that was first developed and released by Swedish developer Markus Persson. It was officially released in 2011. Five different editions were developed to fit the platforms of its release: Java Edition, Bedrock Edition (Windows 10, Playstation 4, Xbox, and Switch), Education Edition, Fire OS Edition, and New Nintendo 3DS Edition.

The game is oriented toward a sandbox, open-world setting that provides the player with multiple goals and game modes depending on level and desired gameplay. The core experience of Minecraft has players interacting in a randomly generated game map with blocks. The blocks represent various elements: water, lava, trees, animals, insects, etc. One of the central aspects of Minecraft gameplay is for the player to mine blocks and then use them to make things that will help them later or protect them from danger.

Minecraft quickly became enormously popular, with approximately 126 million copies downloaded in 2017 which made it the 2nd best-selling video game after Tetris. It became particularly popular as a tool to assist creativity and problem-solving in education. There is a plethora of user-created content such as texture packs, world maps, and modification frameworks. In 2020 it won a Game Developers Choice Award for Breakthrough Award.

What are Bees in Minecraft?

In Minecraft, the Bee is the natural, neutral, insect-equivalent mob. They spawn in groups between 1-3 in the Overworld, with a unique buzzing sound that helps to locate them when their hive is nearby. Bees can only become aggressive in defense of a bee’s own hive or other bees. This happens only when players use a tool or try to attack or destroy them. While there are 15 different types of bees in real life, the Minecraft bee was actually designed to be non-biologically accurate and does not represent a specific species of real bee.

How to Get Bees in Minecraft?

Bees can be found in an apiary, which is a beehive that has bees in it as well as filled with either beehive or honeycomb. You can find the apiary or the beehive as a semi-rare block that generates naturally and are more commonly found under the eaves of overhangs than hanging in branches.

To get bees into the beehive, use the Silk-Touch Enchantment rather than the haphazardly breaking beehives in the wild. With the silk touch enchantment you can mine the block and replant it elsewhere. Bees naturally search out sources of pollen (flowers) and take it back to the hive where they process it to create Honeycombs.

Putting bee nests near a legitimate source of flowers will make the bees attempt to move in. Flowers are hydrangeas that are nondirectional sources of pollen which work across biological kingdom boundaries to create nectar. When in bloom, they can then use their unique enzymatic abilities to encourage pollinators to move from plant to plant.

Planting flowers near your apiary will similarly expedite the process, if you do not have any around where you put up your hive. If you want to breed more bees for your hives, have your new nests close to where you mine above ground. The bees forage at most 22 blocks so knowing this, trap the bees to the new nests until they move in.

Finding a Beehive or Bee Nest

Beehives are found naturally in every Biome. Bee nests are found in Sunflower Plains and Flower Forest Biomes (source: Fandom Wiki). When choosing where to obtain bees to build your beehive, it is usually easiest to start by finding a beehive where the bees are already present.

Beehives can be found on trees hanging from leaves. To get bees with a beehive from elsewhere in the world, the bees in the beehive will not respawn so you must find a beehive that is at its maximum production shortly after deploying it where you want it. Collect the beehive using a Silk Touch to avoid the bees leaving the collection.

Collect all necessary equipment like an iron pickaxe, shovel, axe, food, armor, weapons, and building blocks to explore the world to find a bee hive. Keep an eye out for these beehive locations and use your F3 debug screen in open areas to scout out the biomes closest to your home area. Once you find one, follow the same Silk Touch collection procedure.

If you are in a region with bees but cannot find a naturally spawned beehive then create one by using the proper method to bring an existing bee nest with bees to your home and shelter. To make the necessary bee and beehive resources easier to move, implement the block or nest above it Higher Than 1-2 Blocks above the beehive landing point. Bees exit nests and hives on the highest side and immediately fall down if there are not solid blocks to land on.

Using Silk Touch Enchantment

Silk Touch is a Minecraft enchantment that allows players to dig up ores and mineable items without destroying them. It can help you obtain a beehive with bees and move it to a beehive-free location. To acquire a beehive with bees using this technique, look for it in the wild and make cuts with a tool that has the Silk Touch enchantment. You can reposition the beehive using this method, but you will require an axe that has the Silk Touch enchantment to break it.

How to Get Bees into a Beehive?

To get bees into a beehive, there are two reasonable methods. The first and most common is using a bee nest with three or more bees inside. These will move to a new hive (convert their bee nest into a bee hive) when a nest containing a queen is placed within 2 blocks of the three living bees (it only takes two of the three bees being alive). Ensure that an oak or birch sapling is within 2 blocks of the hive.

The other method is by using a queen bee. When the queen bee is placed inside a gathering of bees that have pollen, the bees will swarm around the queen (to produce a temporary angry bee mob). The queen will then find a nearby bee nest or beehive and go to it, with many of the worker bees following. This is referred to as the queen bee pollinating an additional bee nest. If there is already a honey level of 5 or more in the beehive, the bees will create a new beehive at that nest or more often nest as is necessary to accommodate the amount of bees.

Note that in both cases, the players often have to return to their hives later in the day or every few days to make sure that the bees are there and that they have produced honey. In real life, swarms often settle within hours. If bees are not there and there is no honey it means the bees have not moved over and should be fed more flowers.

Using Flowers

The basic technique to attract bees and grow your beehive in Minecraft is to plant flowers around a tree within a 2-radius sphere of the center of the trunk. Every two minutes a bee can be attracted to the flowers generating another day after the beam transforms back to beehive status and can be harvested without experiencing a -5 bee accident. Note that the level of direct bee activity around the hive is not indicative of its growth. Bees can easily enter and exit your beehive to help with honey block production without living there.

Using a Lead

A player can use a lead to get a beehive, but do not attempt to leash the game’s original bees onto the lead. This will not work. A bee can be attracted to a beehive when a player uses a polleniferous flower (sunflower or dandelion preferred to speed up search time) two times. Once a female bee enters a beehive, one can create a bee farm and breed the new bees in an artificial beehive. Artificial beehives are crafted and placed without bees and rented for a use of 630 Minecraft honey bottle clicks to store up to 660 Minecraft honey bottles.

How to Attract Bees to a Beehive?

To attract Bees to a Beehive, you can pick up a Bee and move it within 50 blocks of the Beehive. When making an empty Beehive to attract Bees, the Minecraft Wiki recommends it be placed two blocks above the ground. Bees follow the Beeswax Path from a surrounding Flower to a Hive, according to their AI. They are more likely to follow this AI after 10 minutes outside and much more likely after 60 minutes outside, especially if it is raining.

If Bees are not getting inside your Beehive, it is likely because it is too far from their Flower source. It is also possible they have become aggressive and you will need to wait until they have calmed down. When you are not near the Beehive, Bees will return to their Hive once night falls and each will be hatched for a baby Bee. You can look in your inventory at the Beehive and inside where the experience orbs are kept to check if Bees are presently in the Hive.

Planting Flowers Nearby

Bees naturally make a hive once they have visited flowers nearby. To get them to build up and stay at your Minecraft beehive, you can plant a static safety field of flowers as little as two flowers from the entrance. Bees start to build a nest if there are 18 flowers within 10 blocks of the entrance. This includes any tunnel which starts just outside, down or up and out to a large patch.

Placing a Campfire Underneath

To remove bees quickly in Bedrock or if you don’t want transportation problems by anchoring with flame blocks in Java, place a Campfire Block under the hive and light the campfire. Chunkbase’s slankerzz’s gamepedia credits this method to research by user lzenberg of the Beekeepers forum. Bees attempt to escape the campfire block and, in so doing, break free from the hive. The process takes anywhere from `1 to 2 minutes` depending on how many bees are in the hive. Make sure to have a campfire ready to use for these instructions on how to get a beehive with bees.

What Are the Benefits of Having Bees in Minecraft?

The number-one benefit of having bees in Minecraft is that they are Mojang’s symbolic representation of the real-world campaign mindset the world is working to change to adjust the curve of environmental catastrophe.

Bees can be beneficial to eco-engineering when played by the rules of the game and made to pollinate crops. In exchange for pollinating crops or in some bee nests, bees act as a natural fertilizer. They will promote healthy crop growth and allow players to obtain higher yields than they could normally. For example, turning a full-grown pumpkin plant or sugar cane into a fully-grown plant instantly.

Bees can also help protect plants from stress and other adverse environmental effects. During rainy or cloudy seasons, these microbes protect plants from disadvantageous situations. Players with beehives can make their plants effectively immune to non-fatal sun burns. Bees will pollinate the plant, generate new crops of the same variety, and then return the original crop back to a sprouting crop.

Producing Honey

To produce honey, bees in Minecraft must have ‘Work’ blocks (flowers) to pollinate. The creation of beehives with bees and the collecting of honey is an elaborate multi-step process as described by the game’s developers.

The key elements involve bees, a Jar for capturing them, a to breed them, and biomes such as , , and that generate honey to encourage bees to harvest nectar.

If bees are exposed to , they produce one block of honey after approximately 67 minutes. On top of that, they may generate between 2 and 3 more blocks of honey randomly. To speed things up and improve production rates, bees can be captured with . In terms of breeding them, bees can pollinate blocks to encourage plant growth by consuming nectar or flying into them. When pollinated blocks are harvested, more crops are produced. Bees are capable of travelling large distances to pollinate.

To create these bees necessary for production, placeholders such as are needed. Minecraft bees will continue to leave their hives to pollinate nectar when they return to the hive and the player can stimulate them to make more honey. Any bee population growth or honey production increase cannot be achieved without these placeholders. Place lighting around your beehive to prevent zombies from attempting to attack bees within and acting recklessly while you attempt to adjust and observe the beehive’s setting.

Pollinating Crops

Bees in Minecraft’s primary purpose is to pollinate crops. Bees within 10 blocks of beehives will travel to any of the crops listed to pick up pollen at intervals of around 60 seconds. Most types of trees can become pollinated by bees although these provide little to no benefit, bar a jungle tree with cocoa where the bees gather cocoa beans. A beehive filled with three bees works the best at pollinating crops. If a sufficient number of bees are too close they will head to the beehives regardless of crop cultivation need source of nectar. This goes to show the durability and immunity of crops without needing bees to survive, common for those in caves or on islands.

What are the Risks of Having Bees in Minecraft?

The risks of having bees in Minecraft are minor and easy to address. The most damaging risk is being attacked by bees. Bees have a very low spawn rate in the game and a player must be the instigator of an attack by actively harming bees by either attacking or destroying their hive, angering the insects. To mitigate risk, players need only wear protective armor when actively dealing with bees.

Getting Stung

A player who wants a beehive with bees in the Minecraft game may get stung. Stings occur when bees are harassed or when they are provoked by a player near their hive. Bees usually have a 90% chance of stinging the player to death within 10 seconds of being provoked. They will stop attacking a player and go back to their hive after stinging a player. This is also accompanied by a negative effect called Poison II, that last 10 seconds. During these 10 seconds, health decreases, as damage icon flashes and hearts deplete quickly. Bees can be bred with flowers to increase their disposition towards the player in addition to decreasing the risk of stinging them.

Aggressive Bees

The Nether dimension is filled with lava and brutal hostile mobs with its own unique features. For those who enjoy the more dangerous aspects of the game and want to earn rewards, the piglin bastions in version 1.16 and up have some of the scariest mobs.

The player must go to the player must find a Bastion Remnant and defeat the Piglins inside. Bastion Remnants are the only guaranteed source of Pigsteps in the Java Edition. Piglins, as well as Hoglins, Zoglins, and Striders, which are much easier to kill, are also a source of Pigstep records. Piglin Bastions have three levels: bridge, housing units, and treasure room. The easiest way to find piglins quickly is to enter the Nether, locate a bastion in the Nether, and ally with a few piglins. Piglins are actually pretty good mobs to ally with. Simply throw an item at a piglin, and if the piglin acknowledges it, you have a pearl.

If it picks up the pearl, it will be ecstatic, giving you the opportunity to sit back and dance while the piglin alerts all of its comrades. This is more much more feasible than you think. However, just remember that when you see wither skeletons close by, quickly flee. Even after they have been attacked, Piglins are very tough mobs and will still be aggressive against you.

How to Protect Bees in Minecraft?

You can protect bees in minecraft by preventing their hives from being destroyed by zombies and block breaking. In java and bedrock editions of minecraft bees never leave their hives unless displaced as attempts to spawn a new hive will often result in their death. Adults can often escape the hive by waiting until it breaks and finding a new home even on peaceful difficulty. This can also occur if a baby bee grows to adulthood during the time the hive was disturbed. To fully protect your bees in minecraft, secure the beehive, ensure any hives under construction are blocked off, and distract zombies.

Building a Fence Around the Beehive

You can build a fence around a Beehive to transport it with its bees. Placing a fence around a Beehive containing bees keeps bees inside and allows you to wheel the Hive with them around.

In Minecraft, building a new safe space for bees is as simple as clearing the area around the Beehive and building a fence to keep the bees safe. The newly built fence should be around six blocks high, with fences of any material other than wood working. If the fence is too empty, the bees may be able to bypass it.

That is not a risk in The Beebersons Bee Farm and Quest Park as the bees regularly clipped through the fences (in Minecraft, they think with portals.) However, it is a good idea to build a wooden fence topped with a layer of cobblestone or iron bar. If the bees have met and enjoyed your Beeguiling Anti-Creeper Wall during their maintenance periods, this combination should reliably get them back into place.

Using a Smoker

A smoker is used to calm bees during hive inspections by creating a mist of smoke. Minecraft Edition 1.16.5 and later added this feature to Minecraft. Using bees, eight wooden planks and one honey bucket, you can craft a smoker. When you light the smoker with a flint and steel or fire charge, you can then right click on a beehive to add a smoke effect and remove the bees without being harmed. An unlimited amount of smoke is available in the smoker.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a beehive in Minecraft and how do I get one?

A beehive is a block in Minecraft that contains bees and honey. To get a beehive, you can either craft one using wood and honeycomb, or find one in a forest biome.

Can I get a beehive with bees without crafting it?

Yes, you can find beehives with bees already inside in forest biomes. Look for trees with honey dripping from them to locate a beehive.

How do I attract bees to a beehive in Minecraft?

Bees are attracted to flowers, so place flowers near the beehive to encourage them to enter. You can also use honey or a campfire to lure bees towards the beehive.

Can I move a beehive with bees in Minecraft?

Yes, you can use shears to move a beehive with bees inside, but be careful not to break the beehive or you may anger the bees. It is recommended to use a campfire to make the bees docile before moving the hive.

What happens if I break a beehive with bees in Minecraft?

If you break a beehive with bees inside, the bees will become aggressive and attack you. It is not recommended to break a beehive unless you are wearing protective gear or have a campfire nearby to calm the bees.

How do I harvest honey from a beehive in Minecraft?

To harvest honey from a beehive, you can use a glass bottle or shears on the hive when it is full of honey. However, be careful as the bees will become aggressive and sting you if you do not use a campfire to make them docile first.