Bees

Over two dozen species of bees exist in Frackin' Universe, each with their own uses and benefits. They may be found in the wild on various planets, but rarer varieties are able to be discovered through breeding in Apiaries. Bees can produce a plethora of different resources when raised right, so keeping them is well worth your while!

[EDIT DELETED FOR THE FOLLOWING REASON: Pranking your friends with bees is not a proper usage for them, Kevin.]

Getting Started
To begin raising your own colony of bees, the Apiary Crafting Station is essential to make many of the needed items. A Bug Net must be used to catch the bees themselves, and flower seeds will be needed to provide them with the flowers they need. Apiaries are crafted at the Apiary Crafting Station, needing only to be placed to fill them with one queen and drone(s). It is very important to examine the queen first, under a microscope. When flowers are planted within 80 tiles of the Apiary, and the queen bee mate with the drone(s), they will begin producing items and spawning larva queen and drones, as well as queens and drones around the apiary. Bees are diurnal, nocturnal or both, meaning that they will work and breed during the night, the day or all day depending on the species. Certain frames, however, will prevent this.

Bees will produce different items depending on the species, but each will produce a unique type of honeycomb. These combs can be eaten, extracted, centrifuged, or jarred. The bees will also begin producing additional drones or queens of the same species. Though drones are added directly to the slot filled with active drones unless at maximum capacity, the queens will never be stacked in the active slot. They will always be sent to the output as larva.

If a larva is put into the queen slot of an apiary, then it will hatch into an identified queen or not, depending on whether the larva is.

Examples of queen bees:

Catching bees in the wild
Wild bees look like small colored dots (same as insects in vanilla Starbound) that sometimes fly around. To catch a bee, approach it and start swinging the Bug Net. This tool behaves similarly to Broadsword, so you just need to hit the bee.


 * Early-game bees (Honey Bees, Bumblebees, Orchids, etc.) can be very slow, so it's easy to catch them. Bees that inhabit higher-tier biomes (like Red-Banded Bees) can move very quickly (to catch them, try upgrading your Bug Net to have it swing faster, and also seek the Techs that can help you run/jump/fly).
 * Note that enemies that look like huge wasps ("Giant Bee") are considered monsters, and they can't be caught in a bug net (let's be honest, they are so large that they won't fit into the Apiary).
 * Wild bees of the same species/subspecies always have exactly the same stats. However, a working apiary will sometimes spawn a free-flying bee nearby, and that bee will have exactly the same stats as the current queen in the Apiary. Unless your queen has a high breeding rate, you might want to catch such bee to be a spare for your queen.
 * Nocturnal bees fly only at night (you won't encounter them during the day). Diurnal bees fly only during the day.
 * Can't find any bees on some planet? Almost all biomes have bees, but it's possible for some unlucky planet to not have bees. This is determined on per-planet basis. The way it works: each planet has the list of "possible creatures", and the game picks "which monsters will be on this planet" randomly from this list. So it's theoretically possible for one Ocean planet to have Aquarum bees, and for another Ocean planet to not have them. If you are looking for a specific type of bee, then you might have to search several planets to find them.

Bee Stats
All bees have stats. These differ from species to species, and even between bees of the same species. Basically there are 8 stats:


 * Base Production : Base drone production at 100% hive efficiency.
 * If this stat is low, then bees won't not produce much. If you improve it to be very high, then you might not even know what to do with that much Pure Honey and other resources.
 * Drone Toughness : Number of mites required to kill a drone. Also used in bee on bee fights.
 * If this stat is low, then even the smallest Mite infestation can kill many drones very fast (and possibly the queen, if no drones are left). If you improve it to be very high, then the losses would be minimal.
 * Drone Breed Rate : Base drone breeding rate (0 => No drone mate).
 * If this stat is low, it will take a very long time to replenish the drone population after each change of queen (and the less drones you have, the lower the amount of produced goods). If you improve it to be very high, then drones will restore their numbers very quickly, and you'll often have 1000 drones per Apiary slot (which is the maximum), thus achieving maximum efficiency.
 * Queen Breed Rate : Base queen breeding rate (0 => No larva produced).
 * If this stat is low, a queen may die without leaving even a single Young Queen to succeed her. This is dangerous (requires you to have spare queens) and gets in the way of your attempts at selective breeding. If you improve it to be very high, then each queen will produce many Young Queen successor candidates, so you would have a lot of choices for the next queen, and you would be able to be picky.
 * Warning: queen with Queen Breed Rate being 0 is almost useless. She will still breed sometimes due to Frame bonuses, but you absolutely have to avoid that stat being 0.
 * Advice: when you start breeding a new type of bees (while they stats are still low), you might want to prioritize Queen Breed Rate (that is, replace the current queen with young queens who have a higher Queen Breed Rate), as it will make beekeping much less stressful (you won't have to worry "will my good queen die without successors"). If necessary, sacrificing other stats such as Production is acceptable early on.
 * Queen Lifespan : How many bee production ticks before the queen dies (up to 1295).
 * If this stat is low, you will have to replace the queen often, and because the drones will die on every change of the queen, you would have (on average) less drones working in your Apiary. If you improve it to be very high, the queen will last for a very long time, thus reducing your need for babysitting her.
 * Mutation Chance : Genetic stability. The higher the value is, the less likely the next generation will have the same stats.
 * If this stat is low, then the newly born Young Queen will almost always be the same as current Queen. This can be both a bad thing (it becomes singificantly more time-consuming to get a Young Queen with better stats to improve future generations) and a good thing (if the current queen is already very good, then the chance of next queen becoming worse is also lowered). If you improve it to be very high, then newly born Young Queens will have high chance of their stats being randomly increased/decreased, so by selecting the Young Queen with better stats you will be able to improve the breed very quickly.
 * Mite Resistance : Mite birth rate modifier.
 * If this stat is low, randomly spawning Mites (which can appear in any Apiary) will start proliferating, and their infestation will grow out of control without the player's intervention. If you improve it to be very high, the mites will not be able to grow at all, and their infestation will quickly be eliminated on its own.
 * Work Time : Diurnal, nocturnal, or both.

List of Frames
A frame is needed before bees can start breeding. If you place drones and queens into the apiary without a frame, the drones will begin to die off.

Using several frames in the same slot
You can place up to 64 frames into the same slot of the Apiary. This will give additional benefits if this is a stat-increasing frame (such as Copper Frame, Scented Frame or Tech Frame).

Note that the following frames are non stat-increasing and won't benefit from using more than one frame of this type: 1) frames that provide environment immunities (like Volcanic Frame), 2) Eclipse Frame and Dawn Frame.


 * How the bonus works: If a frame affects some stat (e.g. Production), then overall Production stat will increase by 0.5% (maximum is 32% - this can be achieved by using 64 frames). This increases not just the Production bonus of the frame, but also the Production of the queen.

Selective Breeding
Wild bees are inferior in all ways to what generations of selective breeding and cross breeding will accomplish. Each new generation of queens is influenced by the previous queen's stats as well as the drone that she mated with. Selective breeding is simply the act of selecting which queen(s) should be part of the next generation. Each young queen is unlikely to have the exact same stats as its mother. You can take advantage of this by selecting only the young queens with higher base production than previous generation, or any other stat. Because stats are influenced by both parents, do not keep breeding wild drones with your genetically superior queens, as that will drag down the gene pool.

Cross Breeding
Bee species differ in their base stats, such as Carpenter bees with their naturally long queen lifespan of 1200. As you selectively breed your bees and get higher and higher stats in some areas, you may wonder how to increase other stats that you have not been selecting for. This is where cross breeding comes in. Queens will mate with any drone that is placed in the apiary.

This means that you can have multiple gene pools at once, with each having its own traits that you are selecting for. Place a drone of a different species with higher stats in other areas that you've been selecting for. Keep taking new drones out that become the same species as the queen, ensuring that the queen continues to mate with your drones of a different genepool - until you have a sufficient number of young queens. These new queens will be a mix of the queen and drone. Note that if one species has low production and the other has high production, the offspring may have moderate levels of this stat. However, this remains a means of producing bees with a variety of high stats, by combining your selectively bred lines together.

With your new crossbred bees, continue to selectively breed and crossbreed as needed. Later on, a 'super line' of drones can be used as the genetic stock for all future breeding, so that your new bee species can quickly increase in their stats.

List of Honeycombs
This is a list of all the combs that are part of the Beevamp (Update that completely changed the dynamics of the bees). The results are also shown by placing the combs in an extractor, centrifuge, or honey jarrer.

List of Honey Jar
This is a list of all the Honey Jar that are part of the Beevamp (Update that completely changed the dynamics of the bees).