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[Loud Whispers]

Wait do bees sting? Guard bees? I'd love a bees defense tunnel. If not I need to mod it

Bees do sting. Their sting causes a short pain-dealing syndrome. It can be sadistic fun to put bee hives in prison areas for example, but there are not many practical uses for bee stings. With a little modding you could easily make bee stings lethal

[Stormfeather]

With a little modding you could easily make bee stings lethal

...which could lead to !FUN! since the bees aren't exactly the type to check for friend or foe before they start stinging.

[Loud Whispers]

When you employ a weapon of mass beestruction you accept there will be acceptable side effects

[Buttery_Mess]

Bees are something you do when you've got the time to do it. The more diverse the range of foods you have, the happier your dwarves will be.

[Quarque]

The only thing holding back wax, is that it can't be dyed first before crafting.
Something like wax seals on letters.

Yeah it would be great if there was a second use for wax. Maybe candles?

Using hives for detecting intruders is a pretty cool idea! The bee alarm system.

[CyberianK]

Isn't low productivity actually beneficial?


There are so many high productivity jobs pumping out thousands of items that mean either FPS death or unemployed dwarfs.
Used to start with a turkey egg farm not doing that anymore because the number of eggs is just too high and I only use very small farms now.

Thinking of setting up a beekeeping industry just for keeping some dwarfs working. When the basic needs are met and all military set up etc then it gets a bit boring in the fortress.

edit: as for more uses for wax yes that would be nice. Next to the obvious candles maybe you could also use it for coating clothing to make it wear out a little bit less and also maybe to protect against blood/water splatters etc.

[Buttery_Mess]

As has been mentioned the only real use for keeping bees is to satisfy the need for some dwarves to consume mead. This is not to be overlooked! Diversity is one of the best ways to protect your fort from depression.

[Radio Controlled]

The only thing holding back wax, is that it can't be dyed first before crafting.
Something like wax seals on letters.

Yeah it would be great if there was a second use for wax. Maybe candles?

Using hives for detecting intruders is a pretty cool idea! The bee alarm system.

Bee-Alert.

[muldrake]

Benefits:
- Wax is garbage with low value, that can be used for nothing but crafts. Less useful than bones.

The one use I can think of for this junk is fulfilling completely idiotic noble mandates you don't want to waste real ingredients on.  Also you get it basically for free for harvesting the honey.

- Royal Gelee, according to what I read on the wiki: can be stored in finished good stockpiles, making it harder to access and keep track of. It is also a liquid, and dwarves will prefer to cook solid ingredients instead. If you do manage to get your dwarves to cook it, it is still one of the worst possible ingredients, because it has the lowest value and stack size.
- Honey can also be stored in finished good stockpiles, making it harder to access. It can be used for cooking but is another terrible ingredient for that purpose, for the same reasons.

Worse, much like tallow, it will crowd out better ingredients (so turn it off in the kitchen menu)

Turning it into 5 mead looks better, but mead has a terribly low value too.

It is, because it's generally good to have as much variety in your beverages as possible.  Even garbage like gutter cruor is great to a dwarf who actually likes it.

tldr:
- harder than farming,
- yields inferior products
- hard cap on production that equals the output of two farming tiles

yikes Do the gods hate bees?

I wouldn't go hog wild on beekeeping, but if you have one of these useless dwarves, and a conveniently located hive, I usually just put 4 hives nsew of it, set two to harvest and two to split after harvests, and start a small workflow to a) harvest hive products b) then press the honeycomb c) then brew mead with the honey and meh, mostly ignore the rest.  Disable it as a cooking ingredient unless you have good reason not to.

This guarantees a small output of mead from time to time.  It doesn't seem valuable but dwarves seem to snap it up the moment it's available.  I never have more by the time of the next batch.

[Eniteris]

It is possible to have a small fort subsist solely* on bees and bee products, but then you're limited to a population of like 20.

*unfortunately royal jelly is liquid and requires a solid base. Quarry bush leaves are suitable to make the most frustrating food industry possible.

[Maloy]

It's more intended to be done as a side industry

They  require no upkeep and can be pressed for honey and wax at any time
You can thus make drink from the honey and crafts to sell from the wax so that is neat

but I definitely wouldn't say it could be your primary industry you just won't be busy enough. Krugg did it in one of his early fort series, but they also spent the majority of time building his very creative looking fort so the time commitment actually worked just fine