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[DwarfMan98]

Greetings fellow dwarves! Have you put some MAGMA in your pants today?

I'm wondering how beekeeping works. I made a hive but I sort of don't really know how it works. Thanks 

[Larix]

Greetings fellow dwarves! Have you put some MAGMA in your pants today?

I'm wondering how beekeeping works. I made a hive but I sort of don't really know how it works. Thanks 

Pah, how pedestrian. Our trousers are MADE of magma.

Beekeeping isn't exactly easy to get into. A good first stop would be, of course, the wiki:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Beekeeping

In short, you build hives, set the options in the 'q'uery dialogue so that colonies are installed there and products get collected, then process the products in the food industry and at the crafting workshop. An important aspect is keeping enough living colonies on hand, because 'harvesting' will kill off a colony; that part of beekeeping is plagued by a serious bug:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=3981

[callisto8413]

THIS I know how to do.  Also love bees, honey, and the history of bee keeping.

Build a few hives and place them somewhere safe.

The Dwarfs will find wild bees and insert them into the hive.

Then wait.  Looking inside every once and a while with loo'k'.  It will show you when it has honey, royal jelly (which is just honey) and wax.

You have two choices - collect (which destroys the colony but not the Hive) and allow it to split when at a certain size (it will tell you when it is crowded and ready to split)

Let us say you have two Hives and both are full of honey and wax and one is ready to split.

Collect from one Hive but always make sure there is another Hive that is ready to split.  Do not collect from THAT Hive.   It will supply the bees for the first, now empty Hive.  So collect from the first Hive and make sure the second is set to split (and not to collect from it).

Once the products are collected, press the honeycomb and then turn the honey into mead, use the wax for crafts, and cook the Royal Jelly.

Hope that helps!   Having mead does seem to help - some of my Dwarfs seem to get upset when drinking the same type of booze again and again.  Change of diet is always good.

[DwarfMan98]

Thanks. That really helps.

Greetings fellow dwarves! Have you put some MAGMA in your pants today?

I'm wondering how beekeeping works. I made a hive but I sort of don't really know how it works. Thanks 

Pah, how pedestrian. Our trousers are MADE of magma.

LOL!!! So... you are a dwarf... wearing magma pant... well... that is BOUND to be FUN!!!!!!!

[callisto8413]

Oops...I mean look into the Hives with 't' command.   As you are viewing items.

[VerdantSF]

With all the effort involved, you'd think mead would have a higher value.

[Loctavus]

How much mead does this actually produce? It seems like a very long winded process and you'd need a large number of hives to make a viable amount of materials.

Isn't there an upper limit to the number of hives anyway?

Guess it's one of those things that's fun but more Dorfy than efficent. Especially if two hives produce one barrel of mead every few months.

All that work and your dwarves guzzle the mead in seconds.

'Urist McLegendary Brewer has suffered the travesty of art defacement!'

[Urist McKoga]

How much mead does this actually produce? It seems like a very long winded process and you'd need a large number of hives to make a viable amount of materials.

Isn't there an upper limit to the number of hives anyway?

Guess it's one of those things that's fun but more Dorfy than efficent. Especially if two hives produce one barrel of mead every few months.

All that work and your dwarves guzzle the mead in seconds.

'Urist McLegendary Brewer has suffered the travesty of art defacement!'

I think is 5 mead per honey.

From wiki:

If your fortress has 41 or more inhabited artificial hives, but less than 60, then interacting with a hive (q) will show:
Too many hives
* Output restricted
Presumably this means that existing artificial hives grow more slowly.
Having more than 41 or more than 60 inhabited artificial hives does not appear to prevent new wild hives from appearing, and these can still be transferred to empty artificial hives.
If you fortress has 60 or more inhabited artificial hives, then interacting with a hive (q) will show:
Too many hives
* No output
Presumably this means that existing artificial hives no longer grow, or that grown hives can't be split.

[Sutremaine]

Mead has a value of 1, making it less valuable than all subterranean boozes and most of the above-ground ones.

Given the trouble you have to go through to get it, a value of 10 may even be conservative.

[knutor]

None of my 152 dwarfs in this current fortress, do beekeeping or waxcrafting. 

Beekeeping is a suicidal trade, see the dorf will leave the safety net and chase bees and seek bee hives in the middle of a SIEGE, regardless of burrow settings, militia active/inactive.. They will locate insects above all else, and they will even visit long gone insect mounds and wait for the queen to rearrive, standing there still, very still, almost deathly still.. 

A trade needing some luv, beekeeping is.  Although, with that being said, the hives do make nice buildings to distract building destroyers, long enough to save a bridge.  I get my hives up, there is a max ya can have, then I disable the skill within Dwarf Therapist on that dorf to save his miserable pixel.

[Sutremaine]

Slightly tangential, but...

Do archery targets count as buildings in this case? If so, they'd be a good distraction. You can make them straight out of raw materials, so once you're done with them you can take them down and get your rock back instead of having the unplaced furniture lying around.

[knutor]

Says Archery Targets are buildings on the wiki.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Building

Hives also produce direct fun for cats, a good way to keep unpenned cats in an area.  I'm guessing bee remains count as vermin, when times are hard, so they should be able to be eaten.  Not sure on that, however.

I did some testing with a tame bear and bees and hives, and found nothing, well, nothing cool to report.

[Larix]

Wandering beekeepers are an uncommon problem once you've established a decent industry - there'll be enough splittable colonies in your own hives if you don't overharvest, thus the beekeepers will rarely if ever go outside to get fresh bees. Stuck beekeepers are a known bug with a very easy workaround (toggle the 'c'olony install option in the offending hive; the hive will acquire a proper target once you re-activate the option).

For destructible buildings, how about vertical/horizontal bars? They should be just as destructible and i think they only take one labour to build, while archery targets take architecture and whatever skill is related to the building material.

[Garath]

so, the beekeeping behavior was changed? It used to be that beekeepers would prefer to gather and install a new wild colony rather than splitting an existing one

[Larix]

Hmm, i rarely have less than twenty built hives, so they might just be crowding out wild hives with their growth. With a large 'owned' bee population, their reproduction within the hives definitely will provide the vast majority of colonies installed.