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:

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.
 * Drone Toughness : Number of mites required to kill a drone. Also used in bee on bee fights.
 * Drone Breed Rate : Base drone breeding rate (0 => No drone mate).
 * Queen Breed Rate : Base queen breeding rate (0 => No larva produced).
 * Queen Lifespan : How many bee production ticks before the queen dies (up to 1295).
 * Mutation Chance : Genetic stability. The higher the value is, the less likely the next generation will have the same stats.
 * Mite Resistance : Mite birth rate modifier.
 * 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.

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.