Biomes! Bees

Changelog: Please check the change notes tab

Biomes! Bees is a cozy little mod focused entirely around beekeeping and the stuff that comes with it. This mod is meant to be small and lightweight, less complicated than Alpha Bees but more interesting than beekeeping in Medieval Overhaul, purely out of my own preference.
While you can gather from wild hives, you can also break them to harvest their queen bees, allowing you to build your own apiaries and begin your beekeeping journey.
Both wild hives and colony apiaries produce honeycomb over time. Honeycomb can be further processed for food and materials. You can raise bees and use their products to support the colony nutritionally and/or financially, apiaries even give a small boost to plant growth in their radius. You can even make mead!

It's not all fun and games, though, as failing to harvest from a hive or apiary can go wrong if you pawn has little to no animals skill, resulting in many many angry bees wanting them dead. This can be mitigated a bit by wearing beekeeping gear.

So how does the beekeeping work?

Step 1: You will need to get a queen bee from a wild hive or traders, then build your first apiary.
Step 2: Make sure to plant flowers (plants tagged as decorative) and crops around your apiary, or your bees won't produce honeycomb!
Step 3: Once you have honeycomb and gather it up, you can then refine it into honey and wax. You can eat or ferment the former, and build with the latter.
Step 4: Build more apiaries over time as yours produces more queens.
Step 5: Profit!

• Three types of apiary, Medieval, Industrial, and UltraTech.
• Naturally spawning wild hives (on map gen)
• Beekeeping gear, a mask and a smoker belt tool.
• Bee-based resources
• A bee swarm creature. It even shifts about as it flies!
• Uniquely textured wax floors
• Candles, fancy candles, candlesticks, and candelabras

Mod director & XML: Draegon

Sergkart: XML and C#
Thekiborg: XML and C#
Elseud: Preview Art
SirVan: Almost all the Art
SereQ Some of the Art
The various Biomes! beta testers: Beta Testing


Vanilla Plants Expanded - Any plant used for beauty (such as flower) should work with our apiaries
Biomes! Caverns - Any fungi that are used for beauty also work for our apiaries
Basically any plant from any mod with beauty in the XML will work!

Medieval Overhaul & VFEM2 - Patched by Lucius https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3746323752

Japanese translation: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3745941173


Q: How is this mod different than other mods that add bees and beekeeping?
A: This mod is lightweight and focused entirely on beekeeping. It's meant to be simple yet fun, plus it adds bees as a creature, unlike other mods as far as I'm aware!

Q: Does this mod require Biomes! Core?
A: Nope! It just requires Biomes! Framework.

Q: Are bees dangerous?
A: Yes, though only if you anger them by breaking their hive or being really bad at harvesting honeycomb.

Q: Do apiaries affect plants at all?
A: Yes! They give a growth boost to plants in their radius, but it only triggers periodically to prevent lag.

Q: What plants work for apiary honeycomb production?
A: Any plant that is tagged as being decorative, generally flowers but sometimes other plants. They should all be together in the growing zone UI though!

Q: Is there overlap between this mod and other mods that with similar things?
A: Yes, but Lucius made a patch for us!

Q: Where can I get more queen bees?
A: Your apiaries and wild hives on the map will both produce a queen periodically, though how often depends on the tier.

Q: How much honeycomb does each apiary make?
A: Simple apiaries can feed roughly one pawn per apiary, industrial 1.5, and ultratech 2 pawns!

Q: Is it CE compatible?
A: Not on our end, at least! That's up to them.

Q: Can I commit war crimes with bees?
A: Probably! I leave the how up to you all.

Q: Will there be more content or changes added in the future?
A: It is likely we'll add a few more small things, but overall it's pretty feature complete! I mostly just want to add honeycomb walls and two traits still.