Complete Guide to Forestry Beebreeding

Arin³ · Jul 5, 2012

I've been bored of vanilla lately and I have made so many Technic worlds I don't think there's much in Technic for me to do. With the addition of forestry bees in SMP I was really excited, but then forestry got taken out of Technic. I found myself a good compilation of my favorite tech mods and became an apologist. So here is my COMPLETE guide to forestry bee-breeding.

GUIDE TO FORESTRY BEE-BREEDING
1. The Basics/First Steps
Apology in forestry is very simple. First you will need to build an apiary.

The apiary is the first machine used in apology. It is used to breed bees, and process them.
The inside of an apiary has 2 areas. 1 area has 2 slots for bees. The top slot is for a queen and the bottom is for drones (more on that later). The other area has many slots. This is where items made by the bees will go.

You will also need a beealyser and a centrifuge. The centrifuge requires power to operate, and it is used to process honeycombs. These will be explained in more detail later. The bee-alyser is a carpenter recipy.

These are the machines you NEED to start bee-breeding. The bee-alyser is used to analyse bees (duh!). Every bee has a biome it needs to be in, a flower it needs etc. The beealyser can tell you this, and it can show the possible mutations, possible produce and life expectancy, as well as what type of bee it is and how fast it makes stuff.

Now for the part you have all been waiting for: BEES!

There are beehives all over minecraftia. In different biomes there will be different beehives. Bees from hives are called mundane bees, and they are needed to start breeding. But wait, to collect bees you need a scoop:

This tool is used to break beehives. The mundane bees are (In order of rarity):
Meadows, Forest, Modest, Tropical, Marshy, Wintry.
Meadows bees are found in plains and mountains. They need red or yellow flowers.
Forest bees are found in normal forests and also need normal flowers.
Modest bees are found in deserts - they need cacti.
Tropical bees are from jungles, marshy from swamps and wintry from snow.
Tropical and marshy require vines and wintry requires snow. They need to be in an apiary in the type of biome they spawn in to live.

When you break a forest or meadows hive there is a chance it will drop a valiant bee.
You van also find a steadfast bee in dungeons.
There is one other bee found in hives, but it is... special.
You should now go and collect one of every mundane bee.

You will get a drone and a princess from every hive. Collect extra meadows, modest and forest.

Bees can be bread together to get new types of bees. Some bees are shiny, as they are at the end of the line for that line of bees. These are the ones we will be looking to get. Different bee lines give different produce.

2.Cross-Breeding
Bees can be crossbred to make different species. They have a chance to inherit something about their parents but nothing else. Bee-breeding is based off Mendelian Genetics.

By mixing 2 different species of bee we get new bees. The queen will be the same as the princess but the bees it give birth to will be hybrid.

Lets look at what bees we should breed together.

2 Mundane Bees: Common Bee
Common princess + Mundane bee = Cultivated bee.

(Centrifuge some honeycomb. Use honey drops in a beealyser to get honey drops. Analyse your bees in the beealyser, if they are hybrids keep breeding to find a purebred.

Cultivated Princess + Common Drone = Noble bee
Noble princess + Cultivated Drone = Majestic bee
Majestic Princess + Noble drone = Imperial (Shiny)

The industrious bee produces dripping combs and royal jelly. Dripping combs create honeydew (which is used in ambrosia, a type of food in forestry) and honey drops.

Get another cultivated. breed it with a common drone AGAIN to try to get a diligent bee.

Cultivated P + Common D = Diligent
Diligent P + Cultivated D = Unweary
Unweary P + Diligent D = Industrious (Shiny)

Industrious bees produce honeycomb and stringy comb. Honeycomb makes wax and honey drops, as we saw before. Wax can be used as a substitute to tin in tin capsules. Stringy combs make propolis, which is used to make bituminous peat.

Next we have demonic bees. Anybody using geothermal generators from IC2 would be annoyed that the only way to transfer lava out of the nether is with tin capsules. The demonic bees produce simmering combs, which make phosphor and refractory wax. It can also make ask, which is used in a variety of recipes in forestry.

Putting phosphor with cobblestone in a squeezer will make lava. Refractory wax can make refractory capsules that are less expensive than tin capsules, but unlike wax capsules can hold lava.

The demonic bees need to give birth in the nether. Find a place in the nether to put your apiary. Demonic bees require nether-wart and they hurt you if you walk nearby.

Cultivated P + Modest or Tropical D = Sinister
Sinister P + Cultivated D = Fiendish
Fiendish P + Sinister D = Demonic (Shiny)The Austere/Edenic strain of bees combines the poison powers of the tropical and the stinging powers of the sinister. Beware.

Modest P + Sinister D = Frugal
Frugal P + Modest D = Austere
Tropical P + Austere D = Exotic
Exotic P + Tropical D = Edenic (Shiny)

Make sure to check which flowers these bees require as they will vary as you are breeding them.

You can also make 2 more types of bees:
Heroic and Rural.

The wintry bee is not used in breeding in the normal forestry edition, it is used in making the omega bee in the FTB edition, however it is recommended to keep the wintry bee in storage for whenever it updates. The same goes for the marshy bee. While the tropical is used in making the edenic bees I would still keep it to make silky propolis.

Meadows P + Diligent D = Rural (Shiny)

Valiant P + Steadfast D = Heroic (Shiny)

Next comes a special bee - the ender bee. The ender bee is found in hives in the end. It needs a dragon egg as flowers, so you need to beat the game in order to complete your collection of bees!
The ender bees don't make anything yet, but you can just wait - they will soon.

2. Reading the Beealyser.
Your beealyser is the key to working out what breeds with what. Here is a simple guide to help work out how it works!

In this image we see me analyzing a forest princess.
You will see that there are 2 collums. 1 for active and 1 for inactive. Active traits are already in effect. Eg. A bee that has the active trait of flowers and inactive trait of cacti will require FLOWERS to live. Active traits describe the bee. Inactive traits are traits the bee can offer in breeding but do not describe it.

Red words are Dominant traits, and have more of a chance to be applied to the child bee in crossbreeding than blue words, which are recessive.

Species is the type of bee. As this is the most obvious trait I will not go into further detail.
Lifespan refers to how long the bee will stay in the apiary without giving birth to new bees.
Bee lives can be (In increasing order):
Shortest - 6 minutes (estimate), Shorter, Short, Shortened, Normal, Long (Up to 20 minutes!), Longer, Longest.

Speed refers to how many items it will make in the course of its lifetime. Ie how fast it is at making its produce.
The speed goes:
Slowest, slower, slow, normal, fast, faster, fastest.

Fertility refers to how many children the queen will have. This forest bee will have 2 drones and 1 princess.

Area is both how far flowers can be from the apiary and how far a dangerous bee will be able to hurt you from. Now is a good time to say that bees will pollinate flowers in its area and make more grow around it.

Bees can have an effect. They can be to sting, to poison, to set on fire or, more commonly, none at all.

You will also notice the beealyser tells you what flowers the bee needs and the bee's scientific name.

The second area gives us more information!

Note: I deprecated this guide about 10 versions of forestry ago.