Hollyhocks & Honeybees

Summary

Wildflowers, apiaries and single-flower honey for vanilla bees. Eleven wildflowers grow in the world. Bees move into an Apiary just as they would a beehive, and the honey it bottles depends on the flowers they visit: keep your bees in a field of lavender and you get Lavender Honey.

Built to be light on servers: there are no new mobs or bee AI, wild flowers in bloom never tick, and an Apiary only does work when a bee comes or goes.

Pairs with Fermented: every honey counts as honey (#c:drinks/honey), so it can be fermented into mead. See docs/FERMENTED_PAIRING.md.

Dependencies: none. JEI and EMI are optional; both get info pages.

Getting started

1. Break a beehive or bee nest. Without Silk Touch it drops 1–3 honeycomb (with Silk Touch the hive drops itself, bees and all).
2. Craft a Hive Frame, then an Apiary.
3. Place the Apiary near flowers, with open air in front of it. Bees without a home (for example, from the hive you broke) find it within about 20 blocks and move in, just as they would with a beehive. You can also lure bees to it with flowers.
4. Put glass bottles in its bottle slot. Every 5 nectar deliveries it bottles a honey and adds a honeycomb.

Wildflowers

Wild patches generate in bloom. A planted flower grows sprout → bud → bloom. A bloom stays open until an Apiary bee brings back its nectar, which pollinates it. Then it sets seed (break it now for 1–2 extra flowers to plant), wilts, and grows back from a sprout. Bone meal moves a sprout, bud or wilted flower along one stage.

All of them are ordinary flowers to vanilla: bees forage on them, breed with them, and are tempted by them.

Apiary

• Holds 5 bees, and each extra Hive Frame in its two frame slots makes room for 2 more (9 with both). A beehive holds 3.
• Right-click to open it: the bees inside and how long until each leaves, the nectar deliveries so far, and which honey comes next (top right). Hover the honey name to see where the deliveries came from.
• Each bee that comes home with nectar is one delivery. After 5 deliveries, if the bottle slot has a glass bottle, it fills one with honey, adds one honeycomb and starts the next batch. With no bottle it waits, full.
• Which honey: the deliveries in the batch decide it. If at least 75% came from one kind of flower, you get that flower's honey; otherwise Wildflower Honey (so 3 clover and 2 hollyhock make Wildflower Honey by default). Vanilla flowers count as wildflowers.
• Hoppers insert glass bottles from any side and extract honey and honeycomb; they don't touch the frames. A comparator reads progress towards the next honey (0–5, 5 = ready).
• Breaking it releases its bees, angry, unless you use Silk Touch, which keeps them inside the dropped Apiary. Its slots drop their contents.
• Like a beehive, a campfire underneath calms the bees.

Honey

Every honey works like a vanilla honey bottle (drink it to cure poison; it returns the bottle), crafts into sugar (1 → 3) and honey blocks (4 → 1), and is in #c:drinks/honey.

Configuration

config/hollyhocks_and_honeybees-common.toml

Tags