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[kefkakrazy]

Beekeeping appears to be uselessly buggy, since the beekeeper likes to stand around mindlessly in random and possibly-goblin-infested chunks of the map.

How can I get beekeeping to work? Is there any kind of workaround to make it function more effectively?

I am fond of the idea of creating a fortress with a bee-based economy, but it's not going to work until I find a way to make beekeepers stop standing around!

[Azated]

As far as I know, beekeeping is too badly bugged for any kind of workaround. Hopefully the next version fixes it.

[Sutremaine]

Use one beekeeper only. You're going to have difficulty with a bee-centric fort, as there's a limit to the number of hives you can have. At 40 hives you start seeing reduced production, and at some point after that (60 or 80) each hive stops producing altogether.

Optionally, allow your beekeeper to look after themselves outside. A fast dwarf in wooded terrain has a chance of dodging bolts long enough for the military to get there, and one who's essentially an off-duty soldier can be given either a crossbow or a more substantial melee weapon. If the latter, they'll need to be activated in case of ambush, as the only weapon civilians will use without being cornered is the crossbow.

[pisskop]

What if you made a greenhouse and burrow and kept them in there?  Oce they got a sample hive couldn't they be forced to stay inside the greenhouse indefinately?

[Mushroo]

Beekeeping actually isn't bugged at all. Did you know you can press 'g' on a hive to toggle "gather hive products" on/off? If you set a certain percentage (you'll have to experiment, I think it's about 1/3) of your hives to not gather products, then your beekeeper will split these into new hives instead of wandering the map to collect wild hives.

But you're crazy if you think you can base your fortress economy around beekeeping. You will struggle to produce enough booze for even 20 dwarfs using this method. Growing plants is at least 10x more efficient!

[kefkakrazy]

Well, it wouldn't be 100% based around beekeeping, but it would be "the bee fort."

The problem is less "he wanders all over the map to collect bees" and more "he gets the Install Hive job and freezes in place until he abandons it in favor of a booze run."

[pisskop]

The solution than is to have bee-sting polymorph a dorf (or elf or gob) into a barrel of booze...

[Mushroo]

Make sure you have only the 1 beekeeper, I haven't experienced that bug myself but I read about it somewhere.

[kefkakrazy]

I do have only one beekeeper. He still spazzes out, often in insecure locations near the map edge....

Guess I may have to abandon the beefort until Toady fixes the jobs for it...

[Mushroo]

Did you try my advice and set 1/3 - 1/2 of your hives from "gather hive products" to "save for split"?

And yes, you must be patient, it will take approximately 1/2 year to get your first mead and 1 year until you are producing in any significant quantity.

[Telgin]

What if you made a greenhouse and burrow and kept them in there?  Oce they got a sample hive couldn't they be forced to stay inside the greenhouse indefinately?

I suspect this would just potentially result in the 10,000x spamming of job cancellations per second by the beekeeper problem.  I've seen this happen.

Anyway, having attempted beekeeping in the past, I can also confidently say that having more than one beekeeper is a certain way to screw it up.  Going back to a single beekeeper fixed most of the problems I had, although I had to drop all of my beekeepers and just add one back to fix it completely.  She would still wander around outside and seemingly do nothing in the most random places outside of the walls, of course.

I didn't really play around with it all that much, but it's probably worth trying configuring some of the hives to be split like Mushroo suggests.  That sounds like it should cut down on the troubles.

[Quietust]

I seem to recall that stuck beekeepers can be freed by going into the (j)obs list and using the RemvCre function to cancel their jobs.

[pisskop]

Every other minute because they go back to their stashspot to count the bugs they've collected..