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 flying about like other insects. 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. "I agree with that" - A victim of one of Kevin's pranks]

Beginner's checklist
To start beekeeping from zero, the following items will be needed:
 * 1 Bug Net (to catch bees)
 * 1 Apiary
 * 1 queen (any)
 * 1 drone (same species as the queen)
 * 1 frame (any)
 * Some flowers growing near the Apiary
 * 1 microscope (any) to have an opportunity to improve bees

See below for many intricacies involved (where to find bees, how to improve them, how many flowers, etc.).

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 30 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.) fly slowly, 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).
 * Enemies that look like huge wasps ("Giant Bee") are considered monsters, and they can't be caught in a bug net.
 * 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.
 * Some bees fly only at night (you won't encounter them during the day), some only during the day. An article about the queen (e.g. Harlequin Queen) will show these restrictions.
 * 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" (including bees), 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.
 * Presence of flowers is irrelevant (doesn't affect the chance to encounter the bee). Wild bees will spawn even if there are no flowers nearby.
 * Damaging weather (such as Poison Rain) can kill the bees that are currently in the air, but it won't prevent them from spawning.
 * Your starting Garden planet is guaranteed to always have 4 species of bees: Honey, Squash, Orchid and Leafcutter.
 * Caught several drones, but 0 queens? Keep looking for a queen in the same place! Both Drone and Queen of the same species will always spawn in the same area (it's not possible for biome to have only Leafcutter Drone and no Leafcutter Queens, or vice versa). Exact ratio is: 60% free-flying bees are drones, 40% queens.
 * Monster Detector tool will make the bees more visible.

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 will 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 drones produced).
 * 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 their 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 beekeeping 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 is the next generation to 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 significantly 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.
 * This stat depends exclusively on subspecies and can't be changed through breeding/crossbreeding. However, some frames (see below) can be used to make bees work both day and night.

Starting stats
See GitHub for the list of starting stats (stats of newly caught wild bees).

In most situations these don't matter, because if you improve the bees, they will be vastly superior to newly caught wild bees.

List of Frames
A frame is needed before bees can start breeding. Most of these frames provide bonuses to different stats to aid the bees in producing goods or increasing their numbers. Some give bees extra capabilities, such as working when they would normally sleep or allow them to live on worlds they would naturally die on.

If you place drones and queens into the apiary without a frame, the drones will begin to die off.

Special Abilities
Physical Resistance: Some bees can die on or hate Toxic, Lunar, Scorched, Volcanic, Savannah, Jungle, Rainforest, (Dark) Sulphuric, or Tidewater planets. Frames that grant this will allow them to live normally on those worlds.

Heat Resistance: Some bees can die on or hate Desert, Volcanic, (Dark) Magma, (Dark) Red Desert, or Frozen Volcanic planets. Frames that grant this will allow them to live normally on those worlds.

Cold Resistance: Some bees can die on or hate (Dark) Snowy, (Dark) Arctic, (Dark) Tundra, Crystalline, Frozen Volcanic, Frozen Moon, (Dark) Ice Waste, or Nitrogen Sea planets. Frames that grant this will allow them to live normally on those worlds.

Rad Resistance: Some bees can die on or hate Alien, Jungle, Barren (All variants), Chromatic, Irradiated, or Cyber Sphere planets. Frames that grant this will allow them to live normally on those worlds.

Day/Night Activity: Many bees will sleep during the day or night cycles on a planet. Frames that grant this will keep them active instead. This will have no affect on bees that work both day and night.

Produces X: These frames will allow bees to also produce materials in addition to their normal items. These materials will drop on the ground in front of the apiary.

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


 * How the bonus works : If a frame increases some stat (e.g. Production), then the bonus of the frame will increase by (maximum is 32% - this can be achieved by using 64 frames).
 * For example, using 40 of Irradiated Frame (which normally gives +10% to mutation chance) will mean  = +12% bonus to mutation chance.

Beware that:
 * Special Abilities do not stack with themselves. You only need one frame to grant Rad Resistance or Night Activity.
 * Frames periodically break (intentionally). This is so rare that is barely noticeable with 1-2 of them, but keeping 64 frames may require re-crafting them from time to time.

Dealing with Mites
Mites are a menace to your hive and a danger to your queens.

If your queen dies, or dissapears, there are two possibilities: her lifespan ran out, or you have mites. It's especially noticeable when you're putting a new queen in and she dissappears right away.

The surefire way to check for mites is to pick up your apiary and look at the icon. If it has a red border, then it has mites. The easiest way to get rid of them is to place the apiary back down, and pick it up again. It should have a normal border now. That means you're clear.

The best way to prevent mites is to make mite protection frames and breed mite resistant bees. Have both of those, and you should never have an issue.

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.

Assuming you have queen of species A and foreign drones of species B:
 * 1) Place queen and foreign drones into the apiary,
 * 2) Wait until the first Young Queen is born. During that time foreign drones will be slowly dying, which is expected and unavoidable. You must keep them in the apiary all that time. It's recommended to have 1000-2000 spare foreign drones if the queen A doesn't have a good Queen Breeding Rate stat. It is suggested to raise the Queen Breeding Rate stat up to 10 before crossbreeding unless you have a lot of spare drones.
 * 3) Once the Young Queen (of species A) is born, remove the foreign drones (their survivors, to be exact) from the apiary (to save their lives).

This newly born Young Queen will have average stats between species A and B. She will always be of species A (same as her mother).

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.

Mutations
When a new Young Queen is created, her stats will be randomized somewhat with both Selective Breeding and Cross Breeding. Both the original Queen's mutation chance and the frames mutation chance are combined to determine if each stat individually is to be altered. If it is, the stat has a 30% change to be increased, a 40% chance to stay the same, and a 30% chance to be decreased. Most stats can change by ±1-3. Mite resistance can change by ±.01-.03. Mutation chance can change by ±.07-.23.

It is always possible for a Young Queen to be an exact copy of her mother.

Rivalries
An important factor in crossbreeding is that some bee species have rivalries. Rivaling bees can still breed. However, the drones will kill each other. If you make it so the children of the offspring don't interact with each other, it is possible to breed them without any fighting.

List of all rivalries (bee in the left column is a mutual rival with every bee that is listed in the right column):

Rivalries only apply when cross-breeding within the same apiary. Apiaries within 10 blocks of each other suffer production loss regardless of bee type (not because of rivalries).

Biome Likeness
Each bee has one or more preferred biomes. Likewise, there are also biomes that they do not like or that are simply deadly for them. In addition to these characteristics, each bee has one or more preferred plants / flowers, which increase its production.

Biome Likeness:
 * 0 = deadly (no production, kills bees)
 * 1 = disliked (-50% production modifier)
 * 2 = liked (no production modifier, default; if not listed, it's this)
 * 3 = favorite (+50% production modifier)

Note: Here, biome refers to the planetary biome, aka the world type. Bees don't pay any attention to which sub-biome their apiary is placed in. For example, an apiary placed in an Alien sub-biome on a Forest world will be modified only by the Forest, and bees which benefit from Alien worlds will not benefit.

Bees on ship and spacestations

 * Bees don't work on player's ship.
 * Bees work on player Space Stations and in asteroid belts. All types of bees can survive there, and they will have normal production (no bonus/penalty for biome). They have an internal day/night cycle, so day-only and night-only bees will only work 50% of the time, same as on the planets.

Effect of flowers on apiary
Apiary produces more and more with every flower within 30 tiles from it (up to a maximum of 20 flowers). Benefit from an immature flower plant (when it's not yet ready for harvest) is 2 times lower than from 1 fully grown flower. Any flower can be used with any bee species, but favorite flowers are significantly better at increasing production.

If there are 0 flowers nearby, the bees won't produce anything. Flowers must be growing on soil, not in trays.

Having impassable blocks between flowers and the apiary doesn't prevent the bees from using these flowers.

List of Honeycombs
Honeycombs can be eaten for mild healing, turned into jars (in Honey Extractor or Honey Jarring Machine), centrifuged (even in a low-tech Wooden Centrifuge) or placed into an extractor.