v0.34:Beekeeping industry

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v50.14 · v0.47 · v0.34.11 · v0.31 · v0.28 · v0.23 This article is about an older version of DF. More Info · V

The beekeeping industry is an agricultural process that allows a fortress to produce auxiliary food (honey, royal jelly), drink (mead), and craftable materials (wax) by farming honey bees.

Basic setup

Before you can have a beekeeping industry you must logically have bees. There are two types of bees in the game: honey bees, which (true to their name) can be used for beekeeping, and bumblebees, which cannot currently be so applied (this may or may not change in the future). Honey bee colonies appear in any non-freezing biome in some number, but are not necessarily guaranteed to appear in your fortress surroundings if you embark on such a biome, especially if a large part of your embark site is incompatible.

Honey bee colonies are one of a number of "colony" type tile features, and so it is possible that all of your "slots" are occupied by other, more boring things. If you do not have any honey bee colonies on your screen, then you (obviously) cannot have a beekeeping industry, at least not until a honey bee colony spawns. If you really want beekeeping you can build bridges over existing colonies to "free up" space for honey bee ones (whether or not this is worth the effort is a different story).

Once you are sure you have a colony of bees, the next step is to create an artificial hive, either from stone at a craftsdwarf's workshop, from ceramics at a kiln, or from metal at a metalsmith's forge. Hives are tools stored in the finished goods stockpile, and can be built by a beekeeper using the Alt+h hotkey. In order to house bees, a hive must be constructed on or adjacent to a tile that is above ground.

Once a hive is installed, it is automatically togggled to "install colony when ready", which will generate a "Install Colony in Hive" job onto the job list, unless the player specifies otherwise (with q-c). Hives can have colonies installed into them from preexisting wild colonies or from hives that are ready to split (more on that later); at this point if there are no wild honey bee colonies on your map you will be notified of it with a job cancellation announcement, and nothing further can be done. It may be beneficial to build a single hive and then see if your beekeeper can find a colony to fill it with rather than go looking for it beforehand if you're unsure whether or not you have any honey bees on your map - if not, you can just deconstruct the hive, and that's that. As for how beekeepers are able to carry thousands of bees at a time to a have with their bare hands, that's a mystery for the ages.

Hive management

From there you has two options:

• You may toggle the hive (using q-g) so that the product is not automatically gathered. This will cause the hive to grow, allowing it to be split into additional hives. Assuming you have spare hives built and available, this is the option you set your hives to in order to grow them.
• Or you can choose to have the hive harvested, causing a beekeeper will approach the hive about three months later to transfer royal jelly and honeycomb into empty jugs. This is the production option; the hives will produce things for you at a steady rate, but will not grow any larger than it already is, and to harvest it you must destroy the colony that is already there; it can then be refreshed by a colony ready for splitting.

Beekeeping as an industry is currently extremely buggy, involves a lot of micromanagement on the supply side, and doesn't produce as many products as it really should to be worthwhile. Most annoyingly, because of a bug where multiple beekeepers will take on the same job and one will become permanently stuck doing it,^Bug:3981 only a single beekeeping dwarf can be confidently assigned to the industry, limiting production. Additionally, there is no way to tell beekeepers to prioritize fortress hives over wild ones for colony installation - they will often wander far out into the map without even the ambusher's crossbows for self-protection. For these reasons the industry is typically seen as a novelty, at least until the kinks are ironed out.

Examining hives

Interacting with a hive (q) will show:

• Which options have been set for that hive (install colony or don't, gather products or save for split).
• Whether it has Outdoor access or No outdoor access.
• If the hive is Ready to be split.

If interacting with the hive shows Not ready to be split then it might mean it has a colony too small to be split, or that it has no colony at all. To see if a hive has a colony, uses "view items in buildings" (t), which will show an item stack of thousands of bees if there's a colony. t will also show if the hive has a honey comb or lump of royal jelly.

Artificial hive limits

If your fortress has 41 or more inhabited artificial hives, but less than 60, then interacting with a hive (q) will show:

Too many hives

* Output restricted

Presumably this means that existing artificial hives grow more slowly. ^[Verify]

Having more than 41 or more than 60 inhabited artificial hives does not appear to prevent new wild hives from appearing, and these can still be transferred to empty artificial hives.

If you fortress has 60 or more inhabited artificial hives, then interacting with a hive (q) will show:

Too many hives

* No output

Presumably this means that existing artificial hives no longer grow, or that grown hives can't be split.

Products

Harvesting a hive produces two items, one of which is a lump of royal jelly, which must be collected in an empty jug, an item unique in that it is only used by the beekeeping industry. Royal jelly is considered a solid food item, and so can either be used in cooking prepared meals or consumed as is. Every harvest will result in a single lump of jelly. The other item produced by a harvest job is the honeycomb, which is a little more complicated to process: it is considered a wax tool and doesn't have any direction application, but when pressed at a screw press produces two products, one unit of honey and one of wax.

Harvesting a hive requires a jug (ae. you cannot harvest the honeycomb alone), as does pressing the honeycomb; carrying the products to their destination stockpile or production point is considered an item hauling job unrelated with the beekeeping labor, so after being harvested by a beekeeper they will be left at the foot of the hive until someone comes by to haul them off, unless the beekeeper has item hauling enabled themselves (in which case they'll send it to nearest applicable stockpiles). The same is true of honeycomb pressing.

Honey can be eaten as is, cooked into a meal, or brought to a still and processed with a barrel or large pot into mead, the only non plant-based alcoholic drink in the game. Wax, meanwhile, can be processed into various wax crafts by a wax worker at a craftsdwarf's workshop. Wax crafts are not particularly valuable - they have a material value of one, the same as wood and non-flux stone - but they're something.

Bugs

• Dwarves have a hard time splitting hives. They also have a hard time keeping track of wild colonies of bees that die out.^Bug:3981
  Having the beekeeping labor enabled on only one dwarf at a time may alleviate these problems. The problem is caused by multiple empty hives targetting the same colony for installing. The most effective troubleshooting method is to look up the job of a 'stuck' beekeeper in the job list, then zooming to the building - the hive which issued the job. Toggling the 'c' option (install colony) off, letting the game run for a few seconds and then switching the option back on will usually clear the faulty job and issue a new 'install colony in hive' job with a legal target colony. Removing and rebuilding empty hives usually fixes beekeepers stuck trying to install colonies, but is much more time-consuming than simply toggling the install option.
• Jugs of royal jelly may be stored in bins as finished goods, preventing their use in the food industry.^Bug:4229
• Stacks of honey bees in their hives can be mangled by forest fires, but will still live, resulting in some odd descriptions.^Bug:4101
• Screw presses may not allow the "press honeycomb" job to be added directly; adding the job via the manager interface will get the work started. This seems to be related to their distance from applicable materials.^Bug:434