Tutorial:Bee Machinery (Apiculture)

This article is part of the Feed The Beast Wiki's Tutorials section.

Bees are one of the most complex mechanics introduced by the Forestry mod, and can be equally rewarding. The premise is rather simple; collect bees, breed bees, get stuff. In actual practice, there is a great deal of time, planning and a little luck necessary to be a successful Apiarist. The goal of this tutorial is to provide a step-by-step set of instructions for a player with a bit of previous experience with Apiculture.

The basic mod that introduces Bees is Forestry; there are also two child-mods, Extra Bees and Thaumic Bees, these two child mods will be talked about in this tutorial.

This tutorial presumes that the player is fairly well established, with access to basic metals and gear. At bare minimum, a source of MJ power (or an Electrical Engine or Blulectric Engine to convert EU/Watts into MJ) should be available as well as Tin, Copper, Redstone, and a Diamond. {Extend for machine components}

A Note about Spoilers

This tutorial includes very many spoilers, bee breeding is meant to be discovered by the player alone and by chance, meaning that there would be decades of potential play time. This tutorial Players who have collected a variety of wild bees and attempted even the most basic crossbreeding of two different kinds will likely not find anything surprising on this page.

The Extra Bees mod introduces several new machines to aid in bee breeding and quicken the process.

Basic Machines

Alveary

This adjustable structure is a must for any heavy apiarist looking to cut some much needed to be cut corners, with the right tools you can mutate 100% of the time, supply daylight, grant a rain shield, and even add some frames... though the 100% chance mutation is obviously the best feature.

Acclimatiser

This is a great machine for the apiarist in an unfriendly biome. No biome works for every bee, but with the handy acclimitiser, even a Wintry bee can survive the harsh elements of the Nether. By placing bees along with certain items into the Acclimatiser, you can slowly change their tolerances to temperature and humidity.

Use blaze powder or lava containers to increase the temperature and ice or glacial water containers to lower it. To change their humidity use either water containers or sand. The acclimatiser uses 500 MJ per process and takes 6 seconds. It can store up to 4000MJ in its internal storage. There is a low chance the species tolerance will increase, and it gets harder as the tolerance increases.

Apiarist Databank

Want to know what bees you have discovered and what bees can be bred? This is the machine for you. It has three modes: Branches, Species and Mutations. It shows all currently discovered branches and species, as well as all mutations and hints to which branches to breed to obtain new bees. The lists can be searched, and the species icons clicked to open the relevant page.

Indexer

Infinite bee storer and sorter, great for the apiarist with a lot of messy chests full of bees.

The Indexer can store an infinite number of bees on multiple pages, and can sort them by both species and the type of bee. It also has a button to transfer all bees in the players inventory straight into the indexer's inventory.

Tier 1 Genetic Machines

Genepool

With this machine you can dissolve your bees down to their DNA for liquid storage. Liquid bee DNA has its uses in more advanced genetic machines. It is a fast process, but use a small amount of BC power. It uses 200MJ, but only takes 2.5 seconds to liquidfy a bee. It has an internal storage of 2400MJ.

Sequencer

Using blank templates the sequencer will consume bees to write their species onto a blank template to give a species-specific template. This holds the genome for the species, and acts as a blueprint. Sequencing is a process which requires a large amount of power, specifically 2500MJ from its 15000MJ storage. It takes 15 seconds to sequence a bee, and queens and princesses are worth much more than drones. Also analyzed bees are worth twice as much, so make sure to analyze them first.

Splicer

Write a species genome onto ANY bees, effectively giving you the power to change a bee's species and traits at will.

Splicing requires liquid DNA and a written template to function, and is a very energy intensive and slow process. Altogether it uses 8000 MJ and takes 25 seconds per bee. Its internal storage is 40000 MJ.

Add bees that you want to be spliced to the left, and a written template to the bottom. Spliced bees with the new species will be output to the right.

Tier 2 Genetic Machines

Isolator

This machine can extract any trait from a bee using only 50MJ/t, but the trait extracted is random.

Put bees in the left slot(s). Put Empty Serum Vial(s) in the right side single slot. Outputs will go in the right side slots. It has a chance to consume the bee, so it is not advisable to use princess, or queen bees.

Replicator

This machine will copy your bee trait serum.

Put the trait serum you want copy in the left slot. Put Empty Serum Vial(s) in the top right single slot. Copies will go to be bottom right slots.

Synthesizer

This machine is used to add charges to your bee trait serum, up to a max of 16 charges, to be used up by the Inoculator.

It needs Liquid DNA so have some available.

Note that the charging process can lower your serum quality thus it is advised to improve the quality in the purifier after having added the wanted amount of charges.

Purifier

This machine will improve the quality of your bee trait serum. Quality of a serum affects its chance of successful use.

This machine needs Liquid DNA to work.

Inoculator

This is the end of line of high tier machines. It injects a bee trait serum into a live bee. Each injection uses up one charge on the serum. Since each bee has active and inactive traits, it might use up two charges per bee (or more if the injection fails).

Sources

• http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1324321-145 http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1324321-145
• http://extra-bees.wikia.com/