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Honey dressings for wounds

16 (24.6%)

Honey-preservation of foods

19 (29.2%)

Bee Anger (if stirred up, hives stay angry for a while; see post #162)

14 (21.5%)

Sting Effects (allergies/resistance; first post)

15 (23.1%)

Equine Enmity (hives attack nearby horses (unicorns maybe); see post #23)

1 (1.5%)

Addition of Stingless Bees (less risk/less honey; see posts #78-79)

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 34

Voting closed: June 18, 2011, 06:22:09 pm

[Granite26]

     Granite26: "How would you micro it to get the weird stuff?"
     Uristocrat: "I assume you'd build the hive in a field of the stuff & try to destroy competing nearby plants."

Because nectar is a depletable resource (flowers take a few hours to refill), you might also be able to get the honey you want through competition.

For example, suppose there are two kinds of flowers near your fort. With just one hive, the honey will all come from the bee's favorite flower. But if you build another hive, the new bees might choose the second flower for its more available nectar.

That's kinda awesome...

hopefully nectar won't be tracked, either.

[NW_Kohaku]

That's kinda awesome...

hopefully nectar won't be tracked, either.

You could abstract that... Just have bees "claim" a certain number of flowers based upon hive size, for example.  Additional hives that are started (or expanding hives) would have to search for unclaimed flowers.

[Granite26]

That's better....

[sockless]

I don't think underground bees would be a good idea, since I think that there shouldn't be an underground alternative to all above ground things.

[NW_Kohaku]

I don't think underground bees would be a good idea, since I think that there shouldn't be an underground alternative to all above ground things.

I was thinking more of "greenhouse" bees, since you could just put a ceiling over the bees and still have flowers that grow to contain bee movement.

Of course, "underground bees" would make some sense if there were underground flowers that actually had nectar, and bees could manage to navigate without the sun as guidance.

They wouldn't even need to be "underground bees" so much as "bees that happen to be underground to get to cave flowers."  We already have cows that can graze on cave moss, and they're not "underground cows", they just are capable of eating cavern grass-equivalents.

[Neonivek]

Well Some Trees and Bushes also produce Nectar for bees: Flower and fruit.

Also yeah not everything above ground needs to be present below ground. It is crazy enough having super efficiant underground crops that are supperior to above ground crops.

[NW_Kohaku]

Also yeah not everything above ground needs to be present below ground. It is crazy enough having super efficiant underground crops that are supperior to above ground crops.

That can be changed.  Currently, underground crops are just completely unexplained magic.  There can be limits and explanations put in, open the spoiler on this post.

[Flaede]

Also yeah not everything above ground needs to be present below ground. It is crazy enough having super efficiant underground crops that are supperior to above ground crops.

That can be changed.  Currently, underground crops are just completely unexplained magic.  There can be limits and explanations put in, open the spoiler on this post.

re: crops, I like how Deon's Genesis mod has their grow-times lengthened considerably. That was a start to evening things out.

[NW_Kohaku]

re: crops, I like how Deon's Genesis mod has their grow-times lengthened considerably. That was a start to evening things out.

I know it's not really the place to rehash the Improved Farming thread in any detail, but grow time lengths have little importance if the actual act of raising a seed to a crop has only two labors involved: planting and harvesting.  Double the grow length from 30 to 60 days, and you just double the farm plot sizes (let's say from 25 to 50), and get functionally the same result. 

If you plant 25 crops every 30 days, you get 50 crop stacks in 60 days for the labor cost of planting 50 seeds and harvesting 50 crop stacks.  If you plant 50 crops every 60 days, you get 50 crop stacks in 60 days for the labor cost of planting 50 seeds and harvesting 50 crop stacks.

Everything about Improved Farming spills out of trying to address that most basic problem of farming being "too easy".

I've actually rewritten a few things in the Improved Farming Rebooted thread to incorporate some of the things discussed here.  Since "Improved Farming" basically expanded to cover all aspects of food production in order to make it a more interdependent system (I.E. you have to care for pastures and feed your grazing livestock), it falls within the purview, especially since it means involving some things like flower cultivation, vermin, and food webs. 

Bah, I've had this subject on my mind for too long, and it's getting to where I can't talk about much without immediately thinking about it.  I had rice with dinner tonight, and immediately thought about how it was white rice, and that meant it had been polished, wheras brown rice contains more of the nutrients than white rice because it still has the...

[sockless]

I don't think that bees should be underground.
Bees, by their very nature require pollen, which fungi don't have. So therefore they can't get their food underground.
That's the science reason.

Gameplay wise, I don't think that there should be an underground alternative for everything that's above ground. I like it how currently your bee hives have to be above ground, so that there is actually at least some use in having access to the outside world.

[Uristocrat]

I don't think that bees should be underground.
Bees, by their very nature require pollen, which fungi don't have. So therefore they can't get their food underground.
That's the science reason.

Gameplay wise, I don't think that there should be an underground alternative for everything that's above ground. I like it how currently your bee hives have to be above ground, so that there is actually at least some use in having access to the outside world.

I agree that bees shouldn't be able to forage below ground.  But I don't have a problem with hives being located there, so long as they have access to the surface.  And bees ought to be able to go through grates and bars, so I see nothing wrong with building the hive underground, channeling out the square(s) above the hive, then building floor bars or grates over that to give them access to the surface, or things like that.

[Flaede]

I don't think that bees should be underground.
Bees, by their very nature require pollen, which fungi don't have. So therefore they can't get their food underground.
That's the science reason.

Gameplay wise, I don't think that there should be an underground alternative for everything that's above ground. I like it how currently your bee hives have to be above ground, so that there is actually at least some use in having access to the outside world.

I agree that bees shouldn't be able to forage below ground.  But I don't have a problem with hives being located there, so long as they have access to the surface.  And bees ought to be able to go through grates and bars, so I see nothing wrong with building the hive underground, channeling out the square(s) above the hive, then building floor bars or grates over that to give them access to the surface, or things like that.

Yeah, I have no problem with this in principle, except for the fact that it sounds like that would require more pathing. Pathing, devourer of FPS, destroyer of worlds.

[Granite26]

Well... outside is 100% connected for flying creatures, so...  getting there is close enough.

[Buzzing_Beard]

Thanks for the comments sockless. You are correct that in real life a beehive needs a protein source like pollen to survive long term. That's why you sometimes see bees with orange or yellow pollen packed onto their hind legs. The pollen is fed to the baby bees to help them develop (adults usually just eat honey).

I thought showing players that bees could be kept indoors and fed sugar-syrup outweighed the added accuracy and complexity of having bees need to feed pollen to their brood. In RL, most beekeepers who cellar their bees for the winter only give them syrup anyway (and let the brood production wind down until the bees are realeased in spring). A beekeeper who wanted to maintain the brood rearing activity of an indoor (or outdoor) beehive could feed their bees a mixture of flour and brewer's yeast as a pollen substitute. Supporting a hive that didn't have access to outside flora (indoors/barren areas/drought) would be more challenging for a player, but the reward would be a supply of honey, wax, and stinging bees.


     Flaede: "Pathing, devourer of FPS, destroyer of worlds."

Beelines: When a hive finds a resource worth collecting (water, patch of flowers, bucket of syrup, etc.), they create a flyway to that resource. Forager bees stick closely to these flyway paths which the scouts convey in their waggle-dances. This lets people with good eyesight and patience follow wild bees back to their hives (a practice known as lining the bees).

[NW_Kohaku]

I don't think that bees should be underground.
Bees, by their very nature require pollen, which fungi don't have. So therefore they can't get their food underground.
That's the science reason.

Gameplay wise, I don't think that there should be an underground alternative for everything that's above ground. I like it how currently your bee hives have to be above ground, so that there is actually at least some use in having access to the outside world.

You are assuming that all underground crops are mushrooms.  That doesn't have to be the case at all.  You can have underground flowers just as easily, since it's a clearly magical ecosystem that produces energy without the need for sunlight.  If anything, an underground flower would need bees more than aboveground flowers, since there is probably less chance for winds that blow in multiple directions, and as such, there would be a powerful evolutionary incentive to use nectar or something similar to attract some kind of bee or other insect that would visit and pollenate multiple underground flowering plants.

It's not "there must be underground bees", it's just simple logical extrapolation of the fairly arbitrary nature of underground flora.