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[Nameless Archon]

I'm almost not sure where to begin, but it's been gnawing on me for a bit, and I feel it's time to speak up.

Let's talk apiaries, bees, honey, mead, wax, and the beekeeping industry. Who am I? I'm just a guy who purused hobby beekeeping once upon a time. I'm sure there's a professional apiarist out there who may correct me on a point or two, and they are welcomed and encouraged to do so. I'm sure there's more - this is what cropped up to my mind after the stream today. So what's wrong?

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1. The harvest model is horrifying, outdated and not in keeping with historical methods of the bronze age period.
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Dwarf Fortress bees are being kept in "hives" which apparently don't support movable comb, movable frames, or harvesting without killing the hive.

This is more akin to "skeps" where the bees are kept in a structure intended to be destroyed (or completely dismantled and rebuilt) as part of the harvesting procedure.

Movable frame/comb models of hive date back to antiquity - like Ancient Greece, if not earlier. (I'm not an expert on traditional beekeeping in Africa or Asia, for example.) Even if we're not talking about "modern" (1600s-era) Langstroth hives, the dwarves should not need to kill the hive to harvest the products. It's counterproductive in managed hives, at best, and a horrifying misuse of your agricultural resources at worst. Per wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beekeeping) on Beekeeping: The movable frames of modern hives are considered to be the descendants of the traditional basket top bar (movable comb) hives of Greece, which allowed the beekeeper to avoid killing the bees. (Emphasis mine.)

Currently, a harvest empties the hive (crush and strain harvest) which is ghastly. Even the Greeks did better a couple thousand years before the tech level of dwarves. Further, this harvest method doesn't make good sense for managed hives, only unmanaged hives which are intended to attract and capture wild swarms for crush-and-strain processing later. Bees keep their brood (eggs/larvae) in a different area of the hive than the stores (honey/pollen, etc), so there's no reason to kill the hive if you can access the honey without doing so and keep the hive cluster intact!

Suggestion: Keep the existing fortress mode "hives" and their crush-and-strain harvest mechanics and rename them to "skeps". Add hives with movable frames or movable comb and no need to kill an entire hive for harvest. Skeps might be created from materials like wood or baskets of straw, while hives would need to be something more durable (wood/metal/stone/glass). Hives would need to be expanded/managed/harvested periodically (keeping the colony but making it unready for harvest if not managed) while skeps could simply be disassembled and rebuilt (behind the scenes, using the current DF harvest model of killing the hive and needing to repopulate).

Thus, I'd suggest that unmanaged skeps be implemented using the existing DF model of beekeeping (no wasted coding labor!) while managed hives require a dwarf to visit once per season to inspect, treat and manage their bees and their brood. (The benefit of managing the hives is that you get more product - and the bees don't need to be resettled after a harvest, so faster restart of production leading to greater overall yields.) Research I found on the topic suggests that the yield per year of transitional (top bar) and 'modern' (moveable frame) hives is much greater than that of traditional (skep) hives - on the order of 2 or 3 to 1 for transitional hives, and 4 to 1 for movable frame hives. See below for more detailed discussion on yields.

Skep examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive#Skeps
Topbar (moveable comb) hive examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_top-bar_hive
Vertical Hive (moveable frame) examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive

The Vertical Hives might be too modern, but topbar hives date to antiquity. Let's stop forcing players to kill their bees!

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2. Caps and limits prohibit beekeeping from being a worthwhile industry in Dwarf Fortress.
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Hives have a softcap of 40. They hardcap at 60. If you attempt to keep your dwarves happy with mead, you fail or you have three dwarves.

There is no way to expand the industry, speed harvests, or expand the products thereby attained. I'm not sure if this is to keep down the checks on 'reproducing bees' (bee populations are exactly tracked -- which no apiary does) but as long as that cap exists, it would be impossible, even given access to the materials, to keep your fortress supplied with mead as the sole alcohol source. That means no substantial uses for wax (you'll never get much) and other hive products being even less common. The waxworkers have been muttering for years!

There's no obvious practical reason for this limitation. Bees forage over a 2-miles-squared area from their hive or more. This is far, far larger an area than is being explicitly tracked on screen by the game in Fortress Mode. No limitation here is really needed from a realism standpoint. (If we have to have one due to the limits of pollen and nectar collection, it'd be large. Like middling-three-digits large.) The limits on bees are not typically the availability of flowers to visit.

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3. Beekeeping runs year round.
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No one harvests bees in the winter. The bees need some food to survive and overwinter their brood. Take their stores in winter and they die, unless you're living in one of those 'perpetual summer' climates, then all bets are off. Don't pull that in a temperate zone, though - they're going to freeze or starve.

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4. Beekeeping is not productive enough.
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Properly managed, bees will produce many, many, many pounds of honey per year/season. I'm not sure what the conversion from 'hive' to 'jugs' is, but it should be one to many, not one to one. I encourage you to ask professional apiarists about their good and bad harvests. Brief research I've done on the topic suggests 5kg/hive/harvest for traditional skep hives, and twice or three times this amount (14-16kg) for 'transitional' hives (top bar) and upwards of four times (20kg+) as much for moveable frame hives. Outliers had harvests of 60kg/year/harvest - this is wildly more productive than DF bee farms, even on a bad day. I've seen references to 200lb harvests in the US, but I do not have a citation for those to hand. Beekeeping needs a massive productivity overhaul just to get this part up to the level of reality.

Yield Citation: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-021-00702-2#:~:text=While%205%E2%80%938%20kg%20of,of%20honey%20per%20hive%20(Fig.

If we use expanded yields to bypass the hive cap (Issue #2) then we need an additional increase in yield beyond this described here.

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5. There are no beekeeping issues (pests, disease, robbing).
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Might be below the level of the simulation (BLASPHEMY!) but currently there are only three hive states: Empty, building population, and harvestable. Bees have to be managed like cattle - no attention to your stocks means no honey and dead (or fled) bees. Some diseases can be treated, some are a death sentence for a hive. Hives don't steal from their weaker neighbors in DF (or get robbed by wild insects if weak)! Some parasites and pests can destroy a hive, its harvest, or the bees. Skunks, bears, mice, ants, hornets, hive beetles, wax moths and even wild hives are potential threats that are absent from DF.

[Azerty]

Good suggestions. Should the value of honey be raised, since it was a pretty high value item OTL? This way, when cooking shall be ameliorated, it will be a worthwile industry.

[Taras]

Good, but first we need to make wax more useful. And wax will be more useful, if make candles from it. So, light update. Or at least wax writing tablets like in Rome.

[A_Curious_Cat]

What about “lost wax” casting?

[Magmacube_tr]

Good, but first we need to make wax more useful. And wax will be more useful, if make candles from it. So, light update. Or at least wax writing tablets like in Rome.

No light update please. Not because all the hassle it would bring, but because I like the idea that dwarven beards are actually mechanoreceptive whiskers which allows them to navigate the pitch black darkness.

[Red Diamond]

There are a lot of bees in a DF hive. 

[Nameless Archon]

Good suggestions. Should the value of honey be raised, since it was a pretty high value item OTL? This way, when cooking shall be ameliorated, it will be a worthwile industry.

I'm less concerned with the arbitrary value of the honey than I am its quantity and the means to produce it. Further, with Toady looking at item values, any move one way or another argued by me would just end up as someone's mod.

When I was younger, I imagined throwing my own bottles, brewing my own mead, putting the latter into the former with a cork. Dwarves not being able to handle many, many hives, is breaking my ability to properly have honey as a source for dwarven alcohol - this is my hill, and I am willing to cry on it!

Good, but first we need to make wax more useful. And wax will be more useful, if make candles from it. So, light update. Or at least wax writing tablets like in Rome.

Wax could remain a novelty crafting material, and I'd be happy, but I suspect that it's probably being underestimated as well, if we're doing a crush-and-strain, unless the hive in question is very small. I think calculating light in DF is a very bad idea from an FPS standpoint. Wax tablets start to sound interesting, but dwarves have paper and bound books... so the question is begged... "Why?"

...and then I realize, it doesn't matter. Maybe the guy wrote his manuscript on a wax tablet. Imagine being the scribe that has to transcribe *that* to paper for mass consumption! Might as well allow tablets to fill the same role as scrolls do now, though I wonder how much info you can put in an A4-sized wax tablet, and how much more perishable that they would be.

What about “lost wax” casting?

Making a piece of armor includes straps and the like, which are below the level of the simulation for most folks (and the game at present) and I kinda think using wax this way (in casting) is the same - it's 'how the sausage gets made' and outside of mods which rework the item system, I don't expect (or want, really) that, per se. However, lost wax casting also brings up the issue of duplication - you're using the wax to effectively make copies of the original, and dwarves are *mad* about quality. The limits are basically the mold's limits so I also wonder if dwarves would appreciate mass-produced items (cast copies) the same way. If there's no difference because the master blacksmith can cast things really well, then minting masterworks (Or artifacts!!) becomes a thing.

There are a lot of bees in a DF hive. 

There are. Knowing this exact count has never improved my game.

[A_Curious_Cat]

<snip>

What about “lost wax” casting?

Making a piece of armor includes straps and the like, which are below the level of the simulation for most folks (and the game at present) and I kinda think using wax this way (in casting) is the same - it's 'how the sausage gets made' and outside of mods which rework the item system, I don't expect (or want, really) that, per se. However, lost wax casting also brings up the issue of duplication - you're using the wax to effectively make copies of the original, and dwarves are *mad* about quality. The limits are basically the mold's limits so I also wonder if dwarves would appreciate mass-produced items (cast copies) the same way. If there's no difference because the master blacksmith can cast things really well, then minting masterworks (Or artifacts!!) becomes a thing.

<snip>

I don’t think you understand what lost wax casting is…

The dwarf would first start with a block of solid beeswax on a wooden base.
 
The dwarf would then carve the beeswax into the desired shape.

A open-ended four-sided box is then lowered over the beeswax sculpture (taking care not to damage it) so that it rests firmly on the wooden base.

Plaster is then poured in and allowed to harden.

The wooden box and base are removed (probably requiring destruction of the box).

The plaster and beeswax is heated to melt the beeswax and the beeswax is allowed to drain out leaving behind a negative mold.

The mold is filled with molten metal, which is allowed to harden.

The mold is then destroyed to free the metal statue (or other item).


If you’ve been following along, you’ll note that both the beeswax sculpture and the plaster negative mold get destroyed as part of the process.  Not really something that lends itself to producing copies of things…



 

<snip>

Good, but first we need to make wax more useful. And wax will be more useful, if make candles from it. So, light update. Or at least wax writing tablets like in Rome.

Wax could remain a novelty crafting material, and I'd be happy, but I suspect that it's probably being underestimated as well, if we're doing a crush-and-strain, unless the hive in question is very small. I think calculating light in DF is a very bad idea from an FPS standpoint. Wax tablets start to sound interesting, but dwarves have paper and bound books... so the question is begged... "Why?"

...and then I realize, it doesn't matter. Maybe the guy wrote his manuscript on a wax tablet. Imagine being the scribe that has to transcribe *that* to paper for mass consumption! Might as well allow tablets to fill the same role as scrolls do now, though I wonder how much info you can put in an A4-sized wax tablet, and how much more perishable that they would be.

<snip>

Historically, the advantage of wax tablets was that the could be “erased” by suspending them open (wax side up) above a source of heat (such as a brazier), thereby melting the wax.  This allowed the tablets to be reused. Imagine a dwarven scribe in a royal court.  They start the day with an entire pile of unused wax tablets beside their desk.  By the end of the day, they have another pile (on the other side of the desk) of used tablets (probably containing some sort of shorthand; each tablet has two “leaves” and doesn’t really hold very much text…).  They then have to transfer all of this to paper (and longhand), after which they then have to “reset” all of the tablets (as described above) in order so they can be used again the next day…


Some other historical uses of beeswax (which haven’t been mentioned yet) include:

Cosmetics.
Encaustic painting.
Bow making.
Strengthening and preserving thread, cordage, shoelaces, etc.
Strengthening woodwind instrument reeds to forestall cracking and splitting.
As a dental tooth filling material.
And probably others…


Also, I’ve always felt that dwarves should be using top-bar hives which can be harvested from without destroying the colony.

Anyway’s that’s my $0.02.

[Quarque]

Good, but first we need to make wax more useful. And wax will be more useful, if make candles from it. So, light update. Or at least wax writing tablets like in Rome.

No light update please. Not because all the hassle it would bring, but because I like the idea that dwarven beards are actually mechanoreceptive whiskers which allows them to navigate the pitch black darkness.

Keep it simple. No light update needed, that's far too complicated. A candle can just be an item that improves the effectiveness of a Pray action, or increases the value of a temple.

[FantasticDorf]

Keep it simple. No light update needed, that's far too complicated. A candle can just be an item that improves the effectiveness of a Pray action, or increases the value of a temple.

I agree, even if a 'light' mechanic is added, to where there are such things as optimal light levels for comfort without actually impacting on what the player can see in fortressmode, but being meaningful to vision in adventuremode a couple of candle objects or standing torches will not hurt as decorative/moodboost objects.

Its easy to forget, but in the raws, dwarves have perfect darksight anyway. So unless you're accomodating mercenaries and visitors/or tracking scentless sneaking enemies its not going to be forced on you.

[Bumber]

Blindness is already simulated for individual creatures. You could just have humans, etc., be blind if they're in subterranean tiles and not holding a candle/lantern. Then humans with bows do the funny arrow shooting dance when a fight breaks out in your tavern.

[FantasticDorf]

lantern.

Just to keep in mind, you can case a candle in a glass box as per like a display case (bit odd to bring over a entire window to cut down to size), but olive oil lanterns by themselves were the most prominent classical choice for a long time due to being easier to industrially scale.

[Nameless Archon]

Historically, the advantage of wax tablets was that the could be “erased”

"Below the level of the simulation" at least for a few dozen more years. Dwarves work in offices (managers, record keepers) but never produce paperwork.

Cosmetics.
Encaustic painting.

Oh, but there's the gems, right there, they are. Yes, Urist: BEARD AND MOUSTACHE WAXING AND COLORATION. We ought to be demanding this in the aisles. Also, the painting method here is new to me - thank you! How durable are such works, given extremes of temperature, even if stabilizers are added?

Also, I’ve always felt that dwarves should be using top-bar hives which can be harvested from without destroying the colony.

Right?

[A_Curious_Cat]

Historically, the advantage of wax tablets was that the could be “erased”

"Below the level of the simulation" at least for a few dozen more years. Dwarves work in offices (managers, record keepers) but never produce paperwork.

Cosmetics.
Encaustic painting.

Oh, but there's the gems, right there, they are. Yes, Urist: BEARD AND MOUSTACHE WAXING AND COLORATION. We ought to be demanding this in the aisles. Also, the painting method here is new to me - thank you! How durable are such works, given extremes of temperature, even if stabilizers are added?

Also, I’ve always felt that dwarves should be using top-bar hives which can be harvested from without destroying the colony.

Right?

I think “below the level of the simulation” is a poor argument for opposing a suggestion.  It’s essentially saying that a suggestion shouldn’t ever be implemented in the game because it’s prerequisites are currently absent.  This is a forum for suggestions related to the game’s development.  A game that has already been in development for around 20 years, and will likely be in development for at least 30 more.  Much can happen in that amount of time…

[Dibbler]

Good, but first we need to make wax more useful. And wax will be more useful, if make candles from it. So, light update. Or at least wax writing tablets like in Rome.

No light update please. Not because all the hassle it would bring, but because I like the idea that dwarven beards are actually mechanoreceptive whiskers which allows them to navigate the pitch black darkness.

Keep it simple. No light update needed, that's far too complicated. A candle can just be an item that improves the effectiveness of a Pray action, or increases the value of a temple.

I really like that idea! Candles improve temples/praying. What if candles could be put on the offering places, raising room value and pray value in that room? They could be an offering, once that becomes a thing.

Would be fun/lewd if it also could improve romantic relationships between dwarfs, with a candle in a bedroom?