Simple Beehive

Simple Beehive
(Building)
Location
	Outside
Size
	1 × 1
Requirements
	Beekeeping ;
Cost to Build
Boards	8
Linen	1

A Simple Beehive (formerly Simple Apiary) allows you to keep bees, which produce Honey and Beeswax.

Sources

This building becomes available after you have learned Beekeeping 0 (Skill).

Cost

8 Boards
1 Linen

Use

When building Simple Beehives, try to set them up away from other buildings, including other hives.

When first built, the Simple Beehive is empty and must attract a queen bee before it begins producing. After you have confirmed that a queen has arrived in the apiary, it will start getting bees over the course of several hours, to a maximum of 1000.

Important: After you attract a queen, you need to check again a little later when the hive has at least 1 bee in it. The hive will not produce any Honey or Beeswax until you do this.
Note: on occasion, a hive will, for whatever reason, fail to attract a queen. If several days go by without a queen arriving, one can either continue to try or tear down the hive and rebuild it.

After you have checked it for the first time, wait approximately 16 hours for first full 10 Honey/Beeswax. After this you can collect about every 7 hours.

Simple Beehive production caps at 10 Honey and 10 Beeswax. If there are already 10 of each when you check, they will be replaced with the new harvest and will not increase. However, if you didn't take the honey/beeswax from the last check, take the contents of the hive, then check, the hive will fill with the new hive production.

Simple Beehives can hold up to 1000 bees. When harvested, the Simple Beehive will lose half its bees, slowing production time of the next batch.

As your speed stat increases, you will begin getting the following message on some harvests: "Due to your quick Speed checking, no bees escaped,"
Because of this, the hive will require less time before another 10 Honey/Beeswax are produced.
The higher your speed,the more frequently this message will appear.

With the skill Beekeeping 1 or higher, you can also capture Queen Bees. This is done from "Utility->Destroy this nest and attempt to capture the Queen bee". This will destroy your Simple Beehive and you will not get any materials back. Higher Speed gives a better chance at capturing. NOTE: When a Queen Bee is captured, a message is shown saying 'A Queen outside of a hive might only survive an hour.'

Simple Beehives are visible and audible to a range of 32 coordinates - it's good form to not place them near other player's camps!

Avoid crowding larger hives

Building a Simple Beehive near a Medium Beehive(and possibly a Small Beehive) will drive out the queen in the existing hive. This is considered unneighborly.

Attracting a Queen

Malard shared the code for determining the chances of any particular Beehive attracting a queen on 6/5/2021:

var SC = max(2, (length(ScanRadiusXY(240, Apiary, xPos(Place), yPos(Place)))-1*2) + length(ScanRadiusXY(240,Physical,xPos(Place),yPos(Place))) - length(ScanRadiusXY(240,Plant,xPos(Place),yPos(Place))) - length(ScanRadiusXY(240,Oasis,xPos(Place),yPos(Place))));

Tips and tricks

According to the official formula shared above, your best chances of attracting a queen would seem to be placing the apiaries at least 15 coordinates apart, at least 15 coordinates from other physical structures, and at least within 15 coordinates of plants and oasis (tree clusters). You can still get queens even if your placement is not ideal however if it is badly positioned enough, it can have a 0% of EVER getting a queen. So best to tear it down if it's just not working.
Building a lot of Simple Beehives packed together will slow down the attraction of queens, the growth of bees and the production of honey and beeswax terribly
Spreading Simple Beehives out too far will mean a lot of running
A speed of 22 will prevent any loss of bees
The "/crowd" command from previous tales is no longer available in T10
If you want to power Beekeeping experience, you only need a beehive to produce 1 Honey or 1 Beeswax. You can check as often as every 10 minutes depending on how quickly the bees replenish at a particular hive.
- I tried a grid of 4 simple hives 12 coordinates in each cardinal direction from an oasis with plants/trees (not water). Queen acquisition was fairly mediocre.
- Later I tried a grid of 2 hives every 20 coords apart in the middle of the desert, and waited 2 days to check them. I got 64/64 queens.
  - Ignore the formula above and space them out, give them 2 days.

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