How to Make Beehives in Minecraft

Have you ever dreamed of being a beekeeper? Well, Minecraft gives you the chance to live out that fantasy without any risk of painful stings. It’s pretty easy to set up a bee farm in Minecraft, allowing you to collect all the honey your heart desires. But first, you’ll need to know how to make a hive, as well as other bee-related tips and tricks.

Keep reading to learn the basics of making a beehive in Minecraft.

How to Make a Beehive

Minecraft demands two key resources for crafting beehives: honeycombs and planks. To be more precise, you’ll require six planks and three pieces of honeycomb per hive. Once you’ve got them, here’s what you need to do:

1. Set out your crafting table.
   
2. Open the crafting menu.
   
3. Place three planks along the top row of the crafting grid and another three planks along the bottom row.
   
4. Put the three pieces of honeycomb in the center, creating a kind of sandwich with planks at the top and bottom and honey in the middle.
   
5. Collect your new beehive and place it into your inventory.
   

Note: You can use any type of plank, and it’s possible to mix and match different colors. The result will always be the same, so you can use different plank types to make as many beehives as needed.

Obtaining the Planks

Making planks out of wood is one of the first things you learn while playing the game, so this won’t be a problem for most players. But, if you’re brand new to the game, you might not know where to start, so here’s how to do it:

1. Get some wood.
   
2. Open the inventory and place a piece of wood in the small crafting grid.
   
3. Each piece of wood gives you four planks. Click to gather them into your inventory. Repeat as needed with more wood to get more planks.
   
   

The most basic way to get wood is to punch trees, which you’ll find in forests and other biomes around the world. Try using an axe to speed up the process. It’s much faster than your fists.

Obtaining the Honeycomb

While getting planks is rather straightforward, obtaining honeycomb requires a little more effort and some specialist equipment. You’ll need a campfire and a set of shears. You’ll also need to locate a bee nest out in the wild. Here’s the full process, step-by-step:

Making the Shears

Before setting off in search of bees and honey, make sure you have a set of shears. You can buy them from shepherds, loot them from chests, or make them with two iron ingots on your crafting table. To do this, put one ingot in the center of the crafting grid and one in the bottom left corner.

Finding a Nest

With shears at the ready, you’ll next need to locate a bee nest. Remember that nests and hives are the only sources of honey and honeycomb in the whole game. So there really is no other option. You’ll need to set off into the world and track down a nest.

To give yourself the best odds, search in meadows. Bees are quite easy to find there. They also like living in similar biomes, such as plains and forests, anywhere with flowers nearby. Look for trees in these areas; the nests will be on the side of the tree, usually a few blocks up from the base.

However, if you want to harvest honey, you can’t just use any nest. You’ll need to find one that has a honey level of five. You can tell the difference by looking closely at each nest. Those at level five have a slightly different appearance, with honey-colored holes and little bits of honey dripping out the bottom.

Placing the Campfire

After locating a good nest, you could just use the shears and snag the honeycomb right away. But the bees won’t be too happy about that. They’re usually neutral mobs, which means they don’t harm people. But if they feel threatened, they’ll turn hostile and start attacking you. That makes it much harder to harvest the honeycomb you need.

Luckily, there’s a simple trick to keep the bees on your side. All you have to do is build a campfire and position it either under the nest or on one of the blocks immediately surrounding it. The smoke from the fire keeps the bees calm and placid, so you won’t have to worry about a whole swarm of them chasing you across the meadow.

To craft a campfire:

1. Open up your crafting table.
   
2. Put some coal in the center square of the grid, with a stick at the top and two more sticks on either side of the coal.
   
3. Place three wood blocks along the bottom row.
   

Harvesting the Honeycomb

With the campfire in position and lit, you can safely harvest the honeycomb. To do this, simply equip your shears and use them on the nest. You’ll be able to extract up to three pieces of honeycomb per nest. After that, you’ll need to wait for the bees to refill it if you want to harvest any more.

Note: You can use this same method to harvest honey, too. Instead of using a pair of shears, use a glass bottle on the nest. The bottle will change into a honey bottle, which you can use to cure poison or for crafting.

What Can You Do With a Beehive?

A beehive is just like a bee nest. It’s a home for bees, and it can be filled up with honey and honeycomb over time. The only difference is that nests occur naturally in the game world, while hives have to be crafted. Up to three bees can live in each hive.

You can set up multiple hives near your home or village to effectively make your own bee farm. This will give you a constant supply of honey and honeycomb. Honey is a helpful healing resource and crafting item, and honeycomb is used for waxing and crafting.

FAQs

How do I get bees in my beehives?

To get bees into your hives, you need to transport or lure them into the area where the hives are set up. There are a few ways to do this. An easy method is to hold a flower in your hand. The bees will be attracted to the flower and follow you wherever you go. You can also simply smash a nest using a “Silk Touch” pickaxe and bring the bees and their nest to your home, or use a lead to guide them.

How do bees make honey?

The bees fly around during the day in search of flowers to gather pollen and nectar, taking it back to the hive to turn into honey over time. They’ll only go up to 22 blocks from their nest or hive, so you need to make sure that they are plenty of flowers in the surrounding area if you want to speed up honey production.

How do I break a hive without hurting the bees?

The only way to break and carry a hive in your inventory is with the help of the “Silk Touch” enchantment. You can apply this enchantment to a pickaxe and break the hive without harming its yellow and black inhabitants. This is handy when you want to move hives or nests to new locations.

Do I need to use campfires on beehives?

It’s not necessary to use campfires on beehives when you want to get some honey or honeycomb, but it’s recommended. If you try to harvest resources without the fire, the bees will get mad and become hostile.

Start Your Own Bee Farm in Minecraft

It can take time to set up your first beehive, as you’ll need to prepare the necessary tools, find the bees, and so on. However, once you get the first hive, the whole process becomes much simpler, as you can harvest honey from that one to make more hives, expanding your bee farm as far as you like.

Have you spent much time raising bees in Minecraft? Got any tips or tricks to find or lure bees more easily? Let us know in the comments.