Minecraft: How To Farm Bees

Building a bee farm in your Minecraft world will allow you to extract honey from the hive and create Honey Bottles and Honeycombs. Honey bottles function as a food source; they can be consumed, consolidated into honey blocks, or turned into pure sugar. Honeycombs, while surprisingly not a food source in Minecraft, can be used to craft Beehives, decorative Honeycomb Blocks, Candles, and can also be used for waxing iron.

Beyond serving as a source of materials, bee hives can also add life and detail to any farm or garden. Flowers will bloom and bees will be buzzing about, adding energy to your landscape.

Basic bee farming

There are ways to build an automated red stone bee farm, for those who, for whatever reason, desire exorbitant amounts of honey. This guide will, however, focus on the mechanics of a basic bee farm and the standard process of breeding bees.

Beehives have a 5% chance of spawning naturally on only oak and birch trees. The tree, however, must be within 2 blocks of a flower that is on the same Y-axis coordinate level as the tree. Inside the hives, a maximum of three bees can also spawn naturally. When a new bee spawns inside a fully occupied hive, it will fly off in search of a new home. The scale of your bee farm is entirely your decision, but ensure that you have sufficient numbers of bee hives to accommodate your needs.

If all you need is a moderate supply of honey, then simply populating an area with oak/birch trees–that feature bee hives–will be a perfectly adequate setup. The bees will buzz around, on their own, pollinating flowers and making lots of sweet sweet honey. Remember to plant plenty of flowers around, when first setting up the farm. Of course, you could spawn loads of trees, hoping that they populate with naturally occurring bee hives–but a much more effective way of increasing your number of bee hives is creating them yourself. Once you have a first hive, you need only a set of sheers and a campfire to collect honeycombs from that initial hive and create more hives yourself.

Once you have enough hives to house your bees, you can start breeding and populating the bee farm. Obviously, you will need at least two initial bees to start this process, but odds are that at least two bees spawned naturally in your first hive. When you feed two bees a flower (any flower will do), they enter “love mode” and will spawn a third baby bee after only a short time. Continue breeding the bees until you populate each hive completely.

The process of extracting honey and honeycombs from a beehive is rather simple. For honey bottles, you need glass bottles; for honeycombs, you need a set of sheers; and for both, you need a campfire. The campfire is to be placed under the beehive, effectively scaring the bees out of the hive. This allows you to reach into the hive with either a glass bottle or sheers, extracting the corresponding item.