Bee

Bee is the pollinator that turns a patch of flowers into a renewable supply of honey and honeycomb. Bees live in bee nests, which generate on trees in flower forests, meadows, plains and cherry groves, and in beehives, the crafted equivalent — the bee hive vs bee nest difference is only where the block came from. Both house up to three bees and fill the same way.

Getting a bee into a beehive is where people get stuck, and the answer is that bees cannot be tamed: they return to the home they already have. Take the nest with a Silk Touch tool while the bees are inside and they travel with it; break it without Silk Touch and the nest is destroyed and the swarm turns on you. Placed near flowers, its bees leave to pollinate and come back on their own, and any bee bred afterwards claims the nearest unoccupied hive — which is how a bee farm grows itself.

A hive fills through five honey levels and drips from the bottom when it is full. Shears take honeycomb out of it and a glass bottle takes honey, and either one angers every bee in range unless campfire smoke is reaching the hive from below. A dispenser loaded with shears or bottles harvests without provoking anything, which is the basis of an automatic bee farm.

Pollinating bees speed up the growth of crops they pass over, so a hive beside a wheat field is a yield booster as much as a honey source. Bees follow a player holding a flower, can be led on a lead, and breed on almost any flower. Stinging costs a Bee its life — the sting leaves poison behind and the bee dies shortly after — so an angry swarm thins itself out, though smoke is the cheaper answer.