Bee Farms for Honey, Honeycomb, & Candles! ▫ The Hardcore Survival Guide [Ep.15] ▫ Minecraft 1.17

Hello everyone my name is pixariffs and welcome back to the hardcore survival guide my bees have gone missing i put a campfire under this bee nest that naturally generated here in our plains village and wanted to farm it for a little bit more honeycomb and probably eventually some honey but

Unfortunately bees have a tendency to wander off a little bit but now we have hold of our silk touch pickaxe i’m actually kind of tempted to start farming honey we’re working up to the dragon fight of course and i think we’re probably going to do what

I did in the empire’s snp and what i have done in the past as well and try and bridge the end void without fighting the dragon first get our elytra get a little bit of insurance against dying in the void and then come back and fight the dragon afterwards it’s an

Approach that i’ve seen a few other folks taking recently there’s a bunch of popular youtubers recently decided to bridge the end void without fighting the dragon first i think it’s probably going to be a good approach to the dragon fight in this world and potentially if you’re not watching too many

Minecraft videos something that you haven’t seen before so we need to start with that is dipping into the nearby forests to see if we can get hold of some more beehives and i am fresh out of that pillager raid that we did in the last episode i haven’t really done

Much in this world since as you can tell from the fact that i still have hero of the village so i’ve still got a little bit of stuff on me got a totem of undying the ominous banners and everything but we’re not gonna need much to go and find

These bees we shouldn’t even need a campfire to be honest with you because the way beehive harvesting works will be nest harvesting out here in the forest is all we need to do is find a bee nest wait until the bees go into the hive and

Silk touch it with a pickaxe or an axe whatever silk touch tool you have to hand and the bees should stay in the hive without you needing to worry about a campfire and once i found a bee nest around here with at least two bees we can breed more and

From there we should be able to start producing our own hives the place i recommend going looking for naturally spawned bee nests to begin with is in a flower forest because flower forests have so many flowers around that it’s an ideal environment for bees and they actually have a higher percentage

Chance of spawning a bee nest in amongst these trees but my flower forest biome is this hilly variant that is actually kind of lacking in trees and it’s not that large which means i will probably not end up finding a bee nest here i didn’t see any bees

Hovering around this area so it looks like we might actually be out of luck here there are three other biomes where you can find bee nests you’ll find them in plains biomes although the trees there are obviously a little bit more sparse i think the best place to go looking for

Them if you can’t find a flower forest is either a birch forest like this one or the regular forest that’s a mixture of oak and birch between the two of those biomes you should hopefully be able to find a bee nest or two once you have your silk touch

Tools available and it took a while but eventually around a thousand blocks out diagonally i stumbled upon a tree with a bee nest in it and i don’t see any bees flying around here which means that the bees were working in the nest and hopefully

We should have two in there that we can use to breed if not just in case i am gonna see if i can grab another nest before we return to our base and of course once we’re at the base we can actually start farming bee nests themselves this right here is looking

Like nest number two it’s already got some honey fantastic and the total b location advancement means that nest actually had three bees inside so that is perfect that is exactly what we need to head back to our base with and start farming some bees ourselves and now we’re back at the village of

Course my hero the village effect is about to wear off i wasn’t really planning on using it all that much anyway and so we’re going to dig out an area at the back of the hobbit hole here for our bee breeding program the main reason for that being

I don’t want the bees to escape right now i’m kind of keen on keeping the bees all in one place and if you leave them out in the open natural though it looks they do have a tendency to wander off so i’d like to keep the bees

Fairly well contained we are going to create a little mossy environment for them back here temporarily just so that we can breed them up and have them visit flowers and then return to the hives and make some honey for us so i’m just gonna bone meal this moss

Block once to spread a little bit of moss around here we can take out all of the extra stuff azalea and grass and whatnot but we’ve got enough light in here that we can get started and we can place down a couple of flowers flowers are important for the bees to

Visit so that they can collect pollen which will encourage them to make a little bit of honey and let’s get a door in here just before we put the bees down for real i’m also grabbing some trap doors to put down here because we’re gonna place a campfire we’ll use the soul campfire

Because i’m fairly certain these work for b nest as well and if we put the b nest there this should now allow us to come through and gather any honeycomb or honey from the hives using shears or a glass bottle and we are going to start with the

Shears because our first task here there we go we got the honeycomb it didn’t anger the bees are perfect the first job here really is to make more hives to create a beehive we just need six oak planks arranged like so three honeycomb in the middle we have ourselves a artificial beehive this

Rather crucially gives us the option to breed more bees and have a home for them to return to and every time a bee enters and then leaves the hive again the honey level of that hive goes up to a maximum of five at which point the honey is ready to

Harvest as either honeycomb or honey bottles now as i was saying if you have a bit of trouble finding a naturally spawned bee nest to get your bee farming project started one thing i would recommend doing is in basically any biome you want to setting down a couple of saplings with

Some flowers a block away i think the flowers can actually be arranged anywhere within a two block radius of the sapling being one empty block and then a flower placed on this block here and i believe that even works diagonally so this is basically the outside range through

Which you can put the flowers and just one flower should do but any virtual oak sapling grown in close proximity to a flower like this has i think a five percent chance to spawn a bee nest when it grows so in theory you can set up this alternating pattern of

Flowers and saplings and eventually one of these trees is going to grow into a tree that has a bee nest attached to it at which point you can start farming bees and breeding bees from the two bees that will pop out of the hype and i think it’s normally two

Occasionally you’ll get three but i think most of the time it will give you enough bees to breed with and of course you can always bone meal these trees to grow them a little faster they don’t need to grow naturally it’s just whether or not you have the bone meal available so i’m

Going to transform this little patch in here into a row of hives or nests with a row of campfires in front of them and with the flowers around here we can start breeding the bees up so we have a decent swarm we’ve got two bees out here right now and you’ll notice

That they stop paying attention to the planted flowers if you’re holding a flower in your hand you can just right click on the two of them they will breed and produce a tiny bee which is frankly pretty adorable and honestly i’m quite surprised that that’s the first animal we’ve bred in this world

But apparently it is so with two nests and two hives here or with campfires underneath that should be enough to get our bee population started and once we have bred up a few more and been able to craft a few more hives we can take this into the automated stage

So while our swarm in here is expanding and expand it is it is actually doing really well right now with a few bees bred up at this point we’re gonna head outside figure out a spot that we’re going to put our bee farm which i think is probably going to be maybe over

Here on the hill by the way there are already at least three free roaming iron golems around this village in case anyone was concerned about the fact that i killed all of the golems at the end at the beginning of the last episode there are oh boy there are a lot of them

There’s one over there there’s one behind me here there is one who was basically on the other side of the village they all came back very very quickly so we’re going to be working on an automated honeycomb farm that takes advantage of shias being able to automatically shear bee hives or be

Nests the first thing i’m going to do of course is head over here and trade with one of my fletches for bows because why bother crafting anything in this game when you can trade it for emeralds so with four bows we can have four dispensers i’ve already crafted four

Observers we just need a couple of blocks and some redstone dust we’re going to turn some of the honeycomb into honeycomb blocks which aren’t really useful for anything aside from decoration but we’re going to use those in the formation of our beehive farm and here is a quick

Tip if you want to craft a bunch of dispensers in a hurry you won’t be able to stack bows in the center because they’re unstackable items but you can stack all the other items in the crafting recipe and then all you need to do is hold down shift and

Left click on the dispenser and then a bow from your inventory and it turns it from a dropper into a dispenser making crafting those ultimately a little bit quicker this farm really comes in two components the first is the auto shearing mechanism which i’m going to explain very quickly here before we put

Together the other part of the farm which is going to be the collection mechanism first of all a fundamental difference between dispensers and droppers droppers will spit out basically any item you put in there without using any of them whereas dispensers will do that with most items

But they actually have a couple of items where they can use the right click action of a tool for example shears can automatically shear sheep if a sheep is standing in front of a dispenser flint and steel will set something on fire and if you have a dispenser

Directly bone meal a grass block it will actually grow grass around it in the same way that it would if you right clicked on a block with bonemeal so she is in the dispenser we’ll be able to shear the honeycomb from a hive in the same way

That we’ve been doing manually first of all we’re going to put a crafting table here to represent the hive we’ll need something over the top of it to detect when the hive gets full of honey and in this case it can be an observer facing downwards with the redstone

Output on the top here we place one solid block next to that and then two pieces of redstone dust over the top so the signal from the observer is transferred into this block here powering the dispenser below it and now every time something happens to the block underneath here

The dispenser will fire and the cool thing about this is that dispensers don’t use up the durability of shias if the shias can’t perform an action so as the honeycomb level of that hive or nest fills up it will activate the observer multiple times but the shears

Will only consume durability when it is able to shear the honeycomb from the hive and that actually means that the shears will last in there perfectly efficiently in the meantime so in this little compact b farm design we’re going to have a series of dispensers facing inwards towards

Some flowers that are going to be placed on a block here and in fact we could probably build this in a plus shape so all of the bees end up on one block swarming around the same flower so with a flower on this block in the center

Something above that so the bees don’t fly out of the top and some blocks around the outside so they don’t fly out of the sides we have a pretty decent little honeycomb farm but we do not have a means of collecting the honeycomb quite yet and that is where we need to

Go and get some hopper mine cuts hopper minecarts are actually really good for this job because if you end up shearing the honeycomb from a hive manually you’ll notice it pops out at a kind of random direction those two all popped out the front but that one you can see popped

Out the top there and that one popped off to the right there’s a bunch of different directions it can travel and in fact that one over there is one i can’t get to unless i dig around the side and open up this wall here and that’s because when you shear

The hive the honeycomb actually appears inside the block itself and the block just sort of pushes it out in a fairly random direction but the cool thing about that is it makes it ideal for it to be picked up using a hopper minecart because hopper mine carts

Are really good at picking up items through blocks so we just need to pick a side to put the output for all of this i figure we’re going to use this side here since it’s fairly close to the way i walk up here from the hobbit hole we’ve got a bunch of hoppers

Leading outwards towards where the collection chest can be and each of the hives is going to be in this space in front of the dispenser we want to leave a block gap and then we need to place a little cross shape of hoppers we put rails underneath where each of the hives

Are going to go like this and then we add a hopper minecart on top of each of those we place a flower right there and that will end up being the only block that the bees can exit out onto which means they should just swarm around that flower and

Immediately return to the hives when they’ve gathered any pollen i expect this farm is probably going to produce a fair amount so i’m going to leave a double chest here on the output hopper we can fill in the block above that because the hopper’s not going to be

Getting any items from above it i think everything looks pretty good here now we just have to place in the bees at this point i think i bred up enough bees that we might actually have a surplus and it’s usually a pretty good sign that all of

Your hives are full when some of the bees end up pollinating from the flowers and then can’t find a hive to go into from all of the available options once you see that being the case it’s fairly safe to wander in there and just grab one of the hives with silk touch

Once again to make sure that the bees don’t get mad at you for breaking it and we can take that outside and put it in the farm and the best time to do that is usually at night because bees in the overworld will always return to their hives around

Night time if they can so i am kind of checking the weather outside checking the height of the sun and waiting for my opportunity to come in and swipe a few of these hives it looks like most of them are in the hives though and if i’m right i think we should be

Able to grab this one and this one and probably also these two and the next phase is to place some slabs around the outside here because we want to make sure that the bees cannot escape the farm i already have a glass block on the top there but we need to be able

To place the hives inside this setup as well and for that we will need a bunch of slabs around the outside and i’m also going to place a trapdoor standing in the trap door and opening it puts me in crawl mode and from here i should be able to place the

Rest of the hives we want one there like so we want one there and we want one there like so and that is all of the hives all good now the sun is going down we should be able to sleep for the night and in the

Morning we can check on how the farm is doing we can hear the sound of all of the bees working in the hives and i’m actually going to block up the sides here so that the bees don’t end up somehow phasing through these blocks and escaping we could do it

With more elegant blocks than cobblestone of course but that’s just what i have on me right now and every time one of these bees leaves the hive you’ll notice the redstone there flashes for a second and that’s because it’s checking for the honey level having changed and

Right now it isn’t going to shear anything because we don’t have any shears in these dispensers so we need to get on that quick otherwise we’ll need to shear the hives manually the first time luckily shears are pretty cheap they’re only two iron each and you can also buy

Them from shepherd villages i believe but we don’t have one of those in the village right now so i’m just going to put three shears in each of those and hopefully each time the hives end up producing honey now they should automatically be sheared for honeycomb which will end up in this chest

Automatically shearing honeycomb from hives or using a dispenser to remove the honey bottles which is what we’re going to be doing in a second here doesn’t actually require a campfire to be underneath because the bees can’t detect who is doing it they don’t get angry at the player for it

And there we go it sounds like one of the hives was just scraped and there we go we’ve got three honeycomb sat there in the chest perfect this should now be a hive of activity pun definitely intended and hopefully will produce a decent amount of honeycomb for the foreseeable future i’m

Only seeing a couple of bees here though so we might have gotten unlucky there and picked the hives that didn’t have any occupants quite yet so we might need to replace some of these hives once we’ve bred up a couple more bees but that should be simple enough our honey farm requires a

Little bit more of a complex redstone circuit but overall this should be easy enough to follow i’m going to place down an output chest let’s say here and we’re going to build this farm basically right next to this one so our honey farms are all

Kind of in a row now we’re going to place a hopper obviously inputting into the output chest we’re going to have the beehives on top of the hopper like so we’re going to have a row of these and on top of this one is where we need

To place the dispenser so the dispenser is actually going to go face down over the top of the hive this time unfortunately we can’t use an observer to detect the changes in the hive this time around because a dispenser will spit out the glass bottles that it uses to gather

Up honey if it doesn’t manage to successfully get honey out of the hives so in theory we would be wasting several glass bottles by doing it that way instead what we need to do is detect the honey level in the hive by using a redstone comparator right now

This is a fresh hive so the honey level is naturally at zero we don’t need to worry too much about that yet since the honey level of the hive or the nest can reach a maximum of five that is the maximum signal strength we will get out of the

Redstone dust coming out of the back of this comparator meaning the redstone signal will travel five blocks like so and the sixth block over here would not receive any redstone power what we need to do is wrap this redstone wire back around into the dispenser over here making sure

That once the comparator has a signal output of five the dispenser is powered and the dispenser gathers honey from the hive using an empty glass bottle so the best way i’ve found of doing this is placing a block in front of the comparator that block actually receives the signal strength

From the comparator and will output it on the opposite side so we can place a redstone dust here then we need to place a piece of glass in front of that and on top of here we’re actually going to wrap around into two solid blocks like that and that

Actually allows for the redstone signal to travel upwards because glass as a transparent block does not block redstone wire from traveling upwards in the same way that putting a solid block here would for example if i put a solid block there that reverts to a dot of redstone

Meaning that the signal isn’t going to travel upwards we want the signal to be able to travel upwards so we’re gonna place two glass blocks like so we’re gonna have that come along to this block here and that’s one two three four five blocks of travel the redstone wire will actually power

The block underneath it meaning that this dispenser will be powered by that block and it’ll shoot a glass bottle out collect the honey and if this dispenser is full of glass bottles the honey bottle will have nowhere to go but out of the dispenser and the hopper

Underneath will pick it up and transfer it into the chest so the idea behind this part of the farm is basically just to keep this dispenser full of empty glass bottles at all times so that any glass bottles that collect honey get spat out into the hopper and into

The chest the cool thing about this circuit is like our storage system it is a tileable circuit so we can build as many of these side by side as we want to and since the comparator signal strength will only reach the relevant dispenser each time we can

Basically build this section as long as we want each of the hoppers can be directed into the central hopper and the overall output of the farm is just going to end up in this chest here although we might have to move the chest outwards a little bit because i’ve just realized we’re going

To need flowers in front of all of these hives so that the bees can gather pollen from them so i guess we need another two hoppers so that we can put a row of dirt blocks along the front here those can revert to grass or we could replace

Them with moss or whatever we want to those are going to have the flowers on and we’ll surround those with blocks to make sure the bees do not escape my preference is to do this with glass since we can see the bees working on the inside of here and

Once i have optifine install for 117.1 which i think there is a preview version out now if not there will be one fairly soon we’ll be able to just see this like a single block of glass and the bees will be nice and visible inside the farm so

In the meantime i put one more hopper in there we’re going to fill this back in it looks like the the grass has already started to spread over here which is great we can fill out the rest of these circuits now i’ve brought a few extra glass blocks so

That we can fill out the rest of the redstone we want one more comparator to go in there and we can come up with a more inventive surrounding for this a little bit later but for now this farm is pretty much fully functional with the exception of needing a row of flowers

And a row of full bee hives that’s all the flowers in place now i just need to replace these front blocks with slabs so that when we place the hives in there the bees won’t be able to get out and i think this farm should be up and running

Oh no it isn’t no it isn’t one more thing i need to do i need to get the glass bottles in here that would have been a bit of a mistake i’m going to start with a stack in each dispenser to begin with got plenty of glass traded from the librarians

So that’s perfectly fine and that should last for the first little while but we basically want to keep these topped up as much as possible so having hoppers with storage above this so that glass bottles can be transferred straight into the dispenser at all times it’s going to

Mean a steady flow of honey bottles without any fear of the farm breaking night is falling outside and the bees should be returning to their hives shortly looks like all of these are absolutely stacked with honey which is great just gonna wait for it to get a little

Bit darker so that all of the bees decide to go in for the night and at that point we should be good at least we have a few extra golems around the village so i don’t have to immediately leap to the villagers defense yep looks like all the bees are re-entering the

Hives and i think it’s fair to say that we can take this one here that one’s got a full load of honey these two in the corner as well those can come with us lovely and we’ll take those two and that should be all the hives we need

Good morning it is bee farming time and i can just put the last few glass bottles into the dispensers because since all of these hives are already loaded up with honey they’re going to give us a first honey bottle basically immediately once we put them into the

System here so i’m going to break this with my silk touch yep there we go we can place some slabs across the front here to make sure the bees do not escape the first places we’re going to want to place hives will be at either end because that’s going to

Block this off or we need to block off the area with the comparator as well we’re placing one hive there and one hive there it’s gonna immediately harvest the honey from any of the hives which are full we can place one more there the bees are already coming out to play and

As you can see the slab is preventing them from getting out here which is great oh i have a feeling the hive at the end might actually have been the hive that i took down my demonstration hive so maybe i’ll have to wait until the bees get

Back in here and then replace it or maybe i can walk up into the side here be sneaky swap that into my off hand and hold down both the left and the right click no no oh no well i broke the comparator didn’t i i broke the comparator that’s

That’s something i should maybe have been a little bit better prepared for now all the bees are angry at me i’ve been poisoned this is the worst day ever luckily for me the bees will calm down after a while and we can potentially lure them back in towards the hives by holding

Flowers in our hands like so come on come on over this way you can also put bees on leads which is kind of a hilarious image actually and is worth doing if you need to be to come to a specific location but honestly all i should need to do is

Open this up and the bees will be able to return to their hives over here which yeah of course ended up going into the chest there right now i’m having to stand here basically to block any of the other bees from escaping the little ones are still going to try though but they

Should hopefully be able to make it underneath those slabs at the front and once this blockage is cleared by some of the bees returning to the hives i might be able to replace this one oh that was a rookie mistake i’m pretty sure once bees pollinate and

Enter a hive they can enter it from any side of the block but i believe they do need to exit from the front of the hive so uh there we go yes we finally have that back in place and we’ll need to coax some of the other bees around here

Back towards the hive that way we should be able to let them in somehow and they should be able to return to the hives they consider home we might actually be able to encourage our wayward bees here to re-enter the honeycomb farm if we keep them

In this area they should be able to track back to these blocks and claim them as their new homes in the meantime i’ve bred up some of the bees inside the farm to repopulate those numbers and if anything yeah this is going to make our honeycomb farm slightly more effective i’m just going

To hang around here with a flower so the bees stay in this area and at night time they should all try and make their way into any available space in these hives i’m also going to let out this one because it’s just stuck in the redstone mechanism right now there we go

Come on out and yeah hopefully these five should all fit into some space in the hives down here here we go night is falling once again we’ve read up a few more bees inside the honey farm we should be able to place a bunch of glass blocks in front of there

All of the honeycomb farm bees have been restocked and we’re going to place some glass around the outside of these now just to make sure they are contained inside of there let’s very quickly get some sleep and hopefully all of our farms should be up and running

At full capacity there we go all of the honeybees are out we’ve got a bunch of honey bottles already in the chest here and the honeycomb farm is producing nicely as well well despite how disastrous that could have turned out with the bees poisoning me and everything i think

We did all right there we can remove the glass blocks from the sides of here now that we don’t have to contain any more bees in the redstone mechanism we can work a little bit more on dressing this stuff up a little later but for now we are at least getting some

Honey which we can turn into honey blocks and that will get us at the glass bottles back from the crafting recipe meaning that we can add them back into the dispensers up here and if you were smart there might be a way that you could set this up so a crafting

Station up here allows you to just throw out the glass bottles and have them evenly distributed amongst these dispensers for now though i’m just going to keep filling up the dispensers we shouldn’t need more than about five hives for what i have in mind because sooner or later all of these

Will just provide us with tons and tons of honey blocks people talk about efficiency in farms in minecraft a lot and obviously the rates of farms are important if you want a bunch of stuff in a hurry but really even with a small farm the only factor

You need to worry about is time if you have time to hang around these farms for a little while then they will eventually deliver you all the honey and honeycomb you could ever ask for and honeycomb is of course a little bit more important in minecraft 1.17 being the active ingredient in

Waxing copper it also allows you to make candles using honeycomb and string in the crafting recipe so i’m going to grab a couple of those and use them to lightly decorate the hobbit hole there we go can place candles around here in clusters of up to

Four and once they are lit with a flint and steel they provide a really nice ambiance provided that you haven’t lit something else on fire in the process but folks i think that is where we’re going to leave it for today’s episode of the hardcore survival guide adventures with bees have begun

And hopefully there we go should be getting a few more honey bottles coming through the pipeline as well thank you folks so much for watching this episode don’t forget to leave a like on it if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and i

Will see you guys soon take care bye for now Do You