Productive Bees Breeding & Conversion Guide

Once you’ve started centrifuging vanilla bees and spawning new ones with hives using treats, you’ll want to learn how to breed, convert, and gene-edit your bees in Productive Bees. This comprehensive guide walks you through the mechanics of bee breeding, the conversion process, and how to efficiently create specialized bee varieties for passive resource farming.

Understanding Bee Pollination and Production

Let’s start with a practical example: the Iron Bee. When you look up an Iron Bee using the JEI mod (pressing U), you’ll discover that to pollinate an Iron Bee, you need iron or something made of iron nearby. Advanced bee hives will produce iron combs from Iron Bees, which you can then centrifuge into raw iron. This means you can passively farm iron through bees.

Getting Your Foundation Bees

To breed an Iron Bee, you’ll need two specific parent bees: an Ash-y Mining Bee and a Crystalline Bee.

Obtaining an Ash-y Mining Bee

You can spawn an Ash-y Mining Bee by feeding a honey treat to a gravel, dirt, or sand nest. There’s a chance you’ll get one from this process.

Obtaining a Crystalline Bee

To get a Crystalline Bee, feed a quartz item (rather than a honey treat) to a quartz nest, which must be located in the Nether.

Transporting Bees to the Overworld

If you want to move your Crystalline Bee from the Nether to the Overworld, simply use a bee cage. Right-click on the crystalline bee to capture it in the cage and bring it home.

Manual Breeding Process

You can breed bees manually by placing two parent bees near each other with the appropriate flower. When you press R on an Iron Bee in JEI, you’ll see that you need to feed any flower to a Crystalline Bee and an Ash-y Mining Bee placed near each other, and they will breed to produce an Iron Bee.

Automated Breeding with the Breeding Chamber

If manually breeding seems tedious, you can automate the process with a breeding chamber.

Building the Breeding Chamber

To construct a breeding chamber, you’ll need an upgrade base, which is simple to craft within Productive Bees. Place your two bee cages into slots one and two of the breeding chamber.

Setting Up the Machine

Insert your Ash-y Mining Bee and Crystalline Bee into the bee cages within the breeding chamber. You can breed these two bees into a Tin Bee (though the result may vary with some chance involved).

Powering the Breeding Chamber

To power the breeding chamber, you can use any mod’s power system (this tutorial uses Mekanism, but alternatives work too). Connect power to the machine so it can operate.

Feeding the Bees

Place the items you’re breeding with into the hand of the bee in the machine. For example, place lily of the valley flowers in the designated slots. Place a bee cage on the right-hand side so the machine can cage the offspring bee.

Accelerating Breeding Speed

The breeding process happens slowly by default, but you can install speed upgrades or speedy upgrades in the breeding chamber to make breeding nearly instant.

Growing Baby Bees with the Incubation Chamber

Once your breeding chamber produces a baby bee (child bee), you’ll need to mature it into an adult bee using an incubation chamber.

Setting Up the Incubation Chamber

Place the incubation chamber and provide it with power. Insert your baby bee into the machine.

Feeding Baby Bees

Unlike adult bees, baby bees require honey treats to grow, not regular treats. Place honey treats in the bottom slot of the incubation chamber. You can press “show recipes” in the interface to see exactly what items are needed.

Adult Bee Collection

The incubation chamber will slowly mature your baby bee into an adult. Once fully grown, you can collect your new adult bee from the right-hand side of the machine using a bee cage.

Bee Conversion

Not all bees require breeding—some require a conversion process instead. Bee conversion allows you to transform one bee type into another by applying a specific item.

How Bee Conversion Works

Some bee species cannot breed amongst themselves and must be created through conversion. The process is simple: right-click on a bee with the appropriate conversion item, and the bee will instantly transform into the new species.

Example: Prosperity Bee Conversion

Take the Prosperity Bee, which is used with Mystical Agriculture mod. To create a Prosperity Bee, take a Crystalline Bee and right-click it with a block of prosperity. The bee will immediately convert into a Prosperity Bee. Prosperity Bees produce prosperity combs, which can be centrifuged into prosperity shards for use in Mystical Agriculture.

The Productive Bees mod includes many bees from other mods, so check the documentation to see which ones require conversion versus breeding.

Summary

You now have all the tools to breed, convert, and cultivate specialized bees in Productive Bees. Start by obtaining parent bees like the Ash-y Mining Bee and Crystalline Bee, then use either manual breeding or automated breeding chambers to create new bee varieties. Once babies are produced, mature them in incubation chambers using honey treats. For bees that can’t breed, use the simple right-click conversion method with the appropriate item. With these techniques, you can build an efficient bee farm to passively produce valuable resources for your Minecraft world.

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