Bees are gentle, hard-working animals that help plants pollinate and produce sweet honey to survive the long cold winters.
Bees in space, on the other hand, are far more aggressive, but all the more useful: since there is no winter in space (as far as we know) all honey produced by bees can be harvested, making beekeeping really easy. They have also outgrown carrying pollen, a largely obsolete task given the small quarters and relatively strong air currents on space stations, and have since evolved to help plants in their fruition phase, granting boost to the potency of their products. They are a great addition to any hydroponic farm that can afford them.
Contents 1 The birds and the bees 2 Sweet slave labor 3 The fruits of our labor 4 Advanced beekeeping 4.1 More bees, MORE BEES 4.2 Miracles of beeology
To start keeping your bees, you will need to procure yourself a queen bee Beequeen.gif. They can be obtained from the special beekeper starter pack crate, available at Cargo for 1500 points. The crate contains:
The queen bee.Beequeen.gif An Apiary Apiary.pngfor the bees to live in, as well as 3 honeycomb frames Honey frame.png. A beekeeper suit, which will protect one person from bee stings. A flyswatter, a very robust tool against small, fast insects. Additional suits can be ordered for 1000 points a pair. Additional apiaries can be built for 40 wooden planks each, and additional frames for 5 planks. Each apiary can carry maximum 3 frames. BEE careful: the Apiary from a crate will deploy as soon as the crate is opened. You will need to unwrench the bolts if you want to move it.
Once you have deployed your Apiary, pick up the queen bee and gently introduce her to her new home. Assuming some plants are around to sustain a hive, she will get right to work.
Bee.gif the sugar mine Once your queen bee is at home producing the workforce and there is plenty of plants to procure nectar from, it's time to reap the benefits.
Examining an apiary will present you with information regarding the colony:
Resources: goes from 0 to 100, and reflects how much nectar the bees have currently stored.
Resources towards a cell: in percentage points, reflects how much of the needed nectar for honeycomb production has been harvested.
Resources towards a bee: in percentage points, reflects how much of the needed nectar for a new bee has been harvested. Always half of a honeycomb.
Total honeycombs: How many honeycombs are currently in the Apiary. If this line isn't present, there are none.
Bees are half as cheap for an hive to produce than a honeycomb, and though their production is based on chance, it is very likely for a hive to overproduce bees as long as they have room for more. The maximum number of bees a hive can support is half the maximum number of honeycombs. Since each honeycomb frame can support 10 honeycomb clusters, and each apiary can house 3 frames, the maximum number of bees is either 5, 10 or 15, and the maximum number of honeycombs is 10, 20 or 30. For early honey production, it is advised to put just one frame in the apiary.
To harvest honey, simply remove a honeycomb frame. Each honeycomb cluster provides 5 units of honey once processed in a grinder.
So, what CAN you do with honey?
Mead.gif Mead, a fermented drink from honey produced with universal enzymes. Good alcohol content. Honeybun.png Honeybun, a pastry. Honeybar.png Honey nut bar, a healthy snack made with oats, nut free. SMed.png Healing wounds. Honey heals you about as quickly as Omnizine, without the risk of an immediate overdose. Keep in mind that you can still go into a diabetic (sugar) coma from eating huge amounts. OpTable.gif Surgery! Honey is the strongest available disinfectant, improving the success rate for surgery steps by 60%. You can splash it on, put it in a spray bottle or make a patch to apply it. Beequeen.gif Beequeen.gif Beequeen.gif Beequeen.gifThe beesplosion reaction. This reaction will create short-lived, angry bees that can carry special chemicals. Beequeen.gif Beequeen.gif Bottle.png Royal Bee Jelly. Injecting a queen bee with at least 5u of this will cause her to split into two queens.
Once you have a Queen Bee, you don't need to order more from cargo - you can force them to reproduce by mitosis! To do so, you need Royal Bee Jelly, made from 40u of honey and 10u of Unstable Mutagen (resulting in 5u). Injecting the queen with at least 5u will make her split into two queens, allowing you to expand your bee empire. You can then build more Apiaries out of wood to house them.
What separates Space Bees from normal bees is that they can bio-synthesize any reagent! By simply injecting a queen bee with 5u of the desired chemical, the queen will transfer the mutation to all its bees; they will then only inject that chemical when stinging people, and their honeycombs will contain 5u of it on top of the honey.
The exact number is 5u of the mutated chemical with each sting. Regular bees sting with plain old toxin. Keep in mind that most beneficial chemicals have overdose thresholds!
How do I bring bees to my garden ApiaryItem.png
For starters, you're going to need an apiary. Those can be built from wood harvested from tower caps logs. There's one inside Beekeeping crates as well.
ApiaryTray.gifApiarySoil.gif
Next, place the apiary on a tray or some soil. Your apiary is now ready to receive its first bees.
QueenBee.png
The beating heart of any apiary is its Queen, your apiaries won't produce any bees until you've placed one in it. Those can be found in beekeeping crates which are ordered from cargo (a crate contains a wooping 3 of those), but can also be captured by destroying wild beehives. A thriving apiary will eventually produce new queens, more on that later.
BeezEez.png
Just like plants need nutrients, apiaries need Beez-Eez to kickstart their growth. These packets contain delicious pollen pellets that will provide bees with food until they can sustain on the fruit of their labour (and until you steal it). These will also help reduce an apiary's toxicity, which can increase if bees pollinate flowers sprayed with pesticides, or consume nectar from toxic plants. Beez-Eez are said to taste delicious by the way.
I've placed a Queen and added some Beez-Eez but no bee is coming out. Is that normal? Yes, a bees won't come out until there's at least 10 of them on top of the queen, as they need workers to manage things inside, so you'll have to wait until the queen has made enough. In doubt, you can examine an apiary to check if the beez inside are starving, which means you've forgotten to add beez-eez. If an apiary is low on food but has a few bees outside, they should eventually bring enough nectar home for it to escape starvation.
A starved apiary will not die out (for now), but won't produce any honey.
On that note, if you haven't planted any flowers yet, now would be the right time to do so.
Bees.gifNice, bees are coming, do I need to take care of them once they're outside?Bees.gif Thankfully our genetically enhanced bees will quickly locate and hover over nearby trays that have living plants in them. As they hover over them, they grant the plants buffs that boost their lifespan, rate of production, and reduce its toxicity.
After having pollinated a few flowers, the bee will head back to its apiary and store all the nectar and pollen it gathered, turning it into honey, and sometimes more depending on which plants were pollinated. If bees come home but the apiary is already full of liquid, new products will replace the old ones.
Keep in mind that bees periodically consume a bit of their stored reagents to satisfy their nutrition needs. Doing so, they might ingest some toxicity. High toxicity means trouble, more on that later.
BeeQueen.gifThat's one huge bee that just came out!BeeQueen.gif That's right, our bees are energetic ones, even the queen will get off its ass to gather some pollen, which by the way is a sign that your apiary is in good health. Now what's nice is that queens produce Royal Jelly instead of honey, which has even higher medical properties, and stacks with honey.
If an apiary has some Royal Jelly and all the queens are away, a worker might consume some of it and become a queen itself. Strangely enough, queens appear to coexist just fine inside a single apiary, this way you can get royal jelly to slowly replace honey by waiting for a while after it has already reached full liquid capacity.
That being said, if there are empty apiaries nearby, a queen will sometime move out by herself to colonize it.
If the queen cannot find an empty apiary, it'll start building its own new wild beehive, which is a bit harder to manage.
ApiaryWild.pngWe've got report that angry bees settles in the IncineratorApiaryWild.png Well, we're still wondering how they got there, but you might want to give a hand at clearing them out, as feral bees can be really, REALLY, dangerous to regular naked crew members…while harmless to better covered ones. Which leads us….
BeesFeral.gifHow do I deal with all those angry bees?BeesFeral.gif BeekeepingSuit.pngBeekeepingHood.png
You let bees slip outside hydroponics and the clown punched them, Feral bees made their home in the Chapel, or you let toxicity build up in one of your apiaries and angry bees are coming out, the result is the same, angry bees, and generally your lynching by the crew. Thankfully you can avoid it by clearing your mess, hopefully.
Assuming you've still got your beekeeping crate lying around, you'll find inside everything you need to deal with feral bees. For starters put on the beekeeping suit and hood, it will protect you from stings. Alternatively any bio suit or sufficiently impermeable suit (such as a spacesuit) will do the trick.
FireExtinguisher.pngFireExtinguisherSmall.png
Now, to actually deal with those bees (and assuming that you don't need us to guide you if killing them is what you're going for), you'll need to calm them. For that, just spray them with water. Chemical sprays, Fire Extinguishers, Smoke grenades, anything works as long as it has water in it. You'll find a mini extinguisher in beekeeping crates.
Calmed bees will stand in place for a while, then calmly hover back to their apiary, if it still exists.
BeeNet.png
If the apiary has been replaced, destroyed, or if you don't want to wait for them to calm down, just swing your net. If you're aiming to catch a single bee, you probably don't need to calm it first, but the need rises as do their number in the swarm. If you angry them, just apply more water. If you empty the net at your fee the bees that come out will be furious at you, so you should rather empty it in an empty apiary. Remember that the more bees are in an apiary, the more nutrients it'll need, so you might find dead starved bees outside the hive as they fight for the little food available.
Anything else that I shouldn't do? Don't attack the apiary. If you do every single bee that originates from it on top of every single bee “inside” it will come rushing to kill you.
I like feral bees, I want to make them even more dangerous well then you can mutate the apiary by using a floral somatoray to modify their brute damage (their damage will either double, not change, or vanish), or have the bees idle above plants that you've injected with a ton of toxins (or just be toxic plants to begin with. Plasticide is very effective in that regard). They'll harvest the toxin inside the apiary, and any bee that comes out of it will deal additional toxin damage. Keep in mind that if an apiary's toxicity raises too high, the bees that come out of it will shortly die.
I see that my apiaries are full of honey, how do I collect it? Honey is stored inside honeycombs. To collect those, you'll have to deconstruct the apiary. An apiary full of honey can yield up to 8 honeycombs. However, deconstructing an apiary means that all its bees will come rushing at your, so make sure to dress properly first!
Hatchet.png
To begin the process, just use a hatchet on the apiary. The bees will start attacking you as soon as you begin, so once the process is over you'll want to calm them and capture them as described earlier, then place them in another apiary, or place them back into their apiary after you rebuild it.
HoneyComb.pngHoneyPot.png
Once you've dealt with the feral bees, just pick up the honey combs. They can be eaten raw, or put in a grinder to isolate their reagents, which you can then store into pots at Condimasters.
Honey and Royal Jelly make some very nutritive food, with various healing properties as well! Medbay's Chemists might be interested in it to improve the potency of their cryo mixes.
Hold on, the honey dripping out of the hives and the honeycombs have an unusual color If you've had your bees pollinate a type of plants exclusively, and these plants produce a reagent in particular, you will find this reagent in your honey, maybe even in equal or greater quantity. This means the honeycomb's colour reflects its flavour. Capsaicin will give honey a darker/redish colour, while Plasticide will make it turn vividly orange (and toxic!).
HoneyColors.png
Wait, are those bees building their own hive now? WildBeeHive.png
That's right. Homeless queen bees will try to find an empty apiary to colonize once they've gathered a dozen workers, but if they can't find one, they'll resort to building their own. Those invasive apiaries work like regular ones, except you cannot insert BeezEez or Queen larvae in them, nor any caught bees from a net. Furthermore, you have to repeatedly hit them with a weapon to break them and harvest their honeycombs. Once broken the lone queen will set to find another apiary once more, so make sure you net her up.
You can avoid having your garden full of wild hives by catching homeless queen bees and inserting them inside wooden apiaries.
Hornets.gifJESUS CHRIST! WHAT ARE THOSE?Hornets.gif WildHornetsHive.png
Hornets. Deadly nasty hornets. Less toxic than bees, but much more brutal. These are extremely fast as well, and have a chance to sting you through protective gear, so you don't want to mess with them unprepared. Thankfully they can be calmed using an extinguisher just like regular bees. They have a chance to spawn during a vermin infestation, destroy their hives or they'll keep respawning!
Traitor beekeepers can also purchase a Deployable Wild Hornet Hive for 5TC. However, hornets cannot gather pollen, and are always angry when leaving their hive, which means that it'll take a while and some efforts to get a sizeable army of those. And even then, their tendency to attack the closest mob makes them pretty unreliable for taking out targets as antagonist. However, they make amazing defenses against the likes of xenomorphs. You're better off deploying the hive in maintenance, putting some bee food inside and running away, some maintenance goblin will get them on the main hallways sooner or later.
Can Vox raise bees at their outpost as well? ChillBees.gifHoneycombChill.png
Our earthly honey bees require oxygen to breath, so that makes becoming the Vox lord of the royal jelly a bit tricky. Fortunately, Vox have their own N2-breathing breed of bees called Chill bugs. True to their name, they almost never ever get angry which means you can catch them up without the need for an extinguisher, and they also resist to most of the chemicals that raise the toxicity of regular honey bee hives.
Most importantly, instead of honey, they produce chill wax. A paste that inhibits the destructive tendencies of most carbon beings. People who eat it will find themselves unable to punch, grab, fire weapons, or swing items at people for as long as the chemical remains in their body. It also makes you see lots of colors. This is a very useful and rare chemical that will surely fetch quite a price on the station.