The latest Minecraft snapshot is here and it brings a brand new mob to play with — bees! Lots and lots of bees.
All “Minecraft got a new bug” jokes aside, you can now find lots of bees (don’t look now, try to act casual!) in three different biomes, as well as nests, hives, and honeycombs to use for crafting.
The bees just arrived, so there’s a lot of speculation and uncertainty about where they spawn and how to interact with them. Here’s everything we know so far about bees in Minecraft‘s 1.15 snapshot!
Where To Find Minecraft Bees
Bees are neutral mobs that won’t attack you unless you attack them first, which is a fairly bad idea, since they will sting.
Simulating stinger loss, bees will automatically die 20 seconds after stinging a player.
Besides causing damage, bees don’t drop anything if they die this way, so try to avoid ticking them off and getting stung.
Bees will travel between their hives or nests and any location with flowers to collect pollen and nectar. At the moment, bee nests are only found to spawn in these locations:
- Beneath trees in forest biomes
- In plains biomes
- In sunflower plains biomes
If they can’t find any locations to acquire pollen or nectar, they will eventually return to their home hive for a short duration. During night time and rain storms, bees will also stop their current activity and return to their home nest to wait until morning.
In the event a bee’s home nest is destroyed or it gets lost, it will search until it finds a different nest to set as its home base.
Bees will follow you around when carrying a flower, and they can be bred with flowers to make new baby bees.
Using Bee Hives And Nests
After gathering pollen from flowers, bees return to their nests and hives to create honey. Full hives and nests are visibly noticeable because they will drop single blocks of honey.
How to Craft a Beehive
Nests can be sheared for honeycombs, and the process can be automated with a dispenser rather than using shears manually. That’s an important process, because you can now craft your own beehives using this recipe:
- Planks x3
- Honeycomb x3
- Planks x3
Besides shearing for honeycombs, hives and nests are used to gather honey by placing a dispenser or bottle against the block.
Full honey bottles don’t stack in your inventory, however honey can be eaten while full and it has high saturation.
Using a single honey bottle while crafting will result in Sugar x 3 being added to your inventory.
You are supposed to retrieve honey from a hive after a bee completes its flying dance, indicating more honey has been added to the location, but there’s an exploit available at the moment.
While it will likely be fixed soon, a bug with the initial release of bees allows you to fill glass bottles with honey from completely empty bee hives and nests. Take advantage of it while you can, because it won’t be around long!
Bee nests and hives can be moved by a player if you want to relocate your bee home base to a better position, but they will be destroyed unless you pick them up using the silk touch enchantment.
Finally, campfire smoke is supposed to calm angry bees, but that functionality appears to be bugged as placing a campfire beneath a nest or hive doesn’t actually do anything right now.
Found any other uses for bees, or know of any other places where they are spawning? Leave us a comment below, then check out our other Minecraft guides:
- Blue Creepers: Where To Find Them And Make Them
- How To Breed Villagers
- The Conduit and You
- How to Get Custom Skins for Xbox One
- Bell Guide: What It Is And How To Get It
- How To Make Fireworks
- The Heart of the Sea Explained
