Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

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

[Buzzing_Beard]

     Flaede: "I know. But I just love the idea of attacking someone with a pulled-off stinger w/ poison still pumping."

Sounds fun, you could still rip one off...

Just for educational purposes:

In honeybees, a ripped out sting will keep pulsing for about 20 minutes but will exhaust its venom after about 10 seconds. The pulsing helps to both deliver the venom and to pull the sting into the victim. Remember that stings aren't "meant" to be ripped out, so it could be messy (mammals are a "new" predator for bees). Finally, don't try it on the ones with the huge wraparound-eyes (you won't find a sting).


An illustration of a worker's sting (relative to a needle tip) that shows its sliding barbs.

[beorn080]

You could set up a kind of messenger service with giant bees fairly easilly. Just provide sugar water at where you want them to go, and have a mechanical bee that does the dance at the hive/corral. Bees would fly out with your messages to the destination, feed, and bring back the messages from there.

I think clockwork bees are a little beyond "mechanism" magic.

We have developed basic computers using nothing but large tracts of land, a water source, and a mountains worth of mechanisms. Mechanical bees would merely require more of each.

[Buzzing_Beard]

Voting has closed.
Winner: Underground Beehives

Syrup-feeding bees doesn't have to be limited to keeping them underground. For example, it could let you harvest ALL of the honey from your above-ground hives without starving them. Taking too much honey before winter and starving the bees is a common beginner's mistake. If you're not feeding them, you generally want to leave each hive with about 60 pounds of honey to make it through the winter.

Honey Generators: The ability to use an underground hive to convert syrup into low-grade honey.
Wax Generators: The ability to use an underground hive to convert syrup or honey into harvestable beeswax.

[Flaede]

Hehe. "Syrup Fed" bees reminds me of this:
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/01/what-happens-when-be.html

tl;dr? Bees drinking maraschino cherry factory runoff = glow-ey red bees (and honey)

[Neonivek]

Underground hives won?

Honestly I may sound like I am joking but at this rate why don't we just remove above ground...

[Buzzing_Beard]

2nd Place: Varietal Honeys
     (some of which may trace their nectar-source to plants which only grow on the surface)

     +colour (light to dark)
     +taste (mild to potent, sweet to bitter)
     +low to high rarity (e.g. sage blooms every 2-3 years, kurinji once every 12 years)
     +varietal honeys could create varietal meads
     +crystallization speed (immediate to never)
     +healing effects (prevent infection, heal burns and wounds)
     +toxic effects (none to severe)

On average, it takes about two million flower visits (the life-work of about 250 bees) to make one pound of honey.

[Granite26]

unfortunately, 2011 is after the 1400s cutoff

[Flaede]

unfortunately, 2011 is after the 1400s cutoff

Next modding project - cat-sized "robo roaches".

[Niveras]

I have not yet read through the entire thread, but it is quite riveting so far.

I will say that I like the potential of adding new - unconventional - hive-able creatures that are unique to the DF universe. I particularly liked the idea of purring maggot hives fed by decaying corpses (a use for re-dead zombies!). Perhaps a maggot lair could be built from a hive tool plus a body part, and the product of the maggot lair is proportional to the size of the creature of origin and its body part? A full humanoid corpse might last an entire year, producing 50,000 units of maggot milk (1,000 units per bucket, think bars where 150 units is 1 bar), whereas smaller body parts would produce proportionally less.

I also liked the potential for a wide variety of honey types based on the plant nectar the hives gathered.

However, like many things, I imagine it's little more than a long winded dream for the time being. It would probably require an additional level of depth to the mechanics surrounding hives, and the purring maggot would require new mechanics, both for producing the lair and producing the lair's products. Some of it can be abstracted away - hives can probably just pick a plant at random and use that to determine the value of the honey it will produce - but there's probably a lot more important matters to work on.

[Neonivek]

Niveras I am under the impression Purring maggots are more related to Silkworms then they are related to flies.

[Granite26]

OTOH, corpses as hive materials is badass and easily mod-able....

Are the HIVE tags generic enough to allow different hive types for different animals?

[Flaede]

Hm. I know it's a bit upthread, but I keep stumbling across stuff like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dbeirne#Messenger_Bees

Are the HIVE tags generic enough to allow different hive types for different animals?

I don't think they are. Not when I tried, at any rate. Or am I missing some set of tags?

[Granite26]

Probably not, I haven't actually looked at the raws since 40d.

Just seems a useful thing to have.  That way you'd be able to mod in the maggots as above, assign terrariums to ants, that sort of thing

[ravensword227]

2nd Place: Varietal Honeys
     (some of which may trace their nectar-source to plants which only grow on the surface)

     +colour (light to dark)
     +taste (mild to potent, sweet to bitter)
     +low to high rarity (e.g. sage blooms every 2-3 years, kurinji once every 12 years)
     +varietal honeys could create varietal meads
     +crystallization speed (immediate to never)
     +healing effects (prevent infection, heal burns and wounds)
     +toxic effects (none to severe)

On average, it takes about two million flower visits (the life-work of about 250 bees) to make one pound of honey.

I just started making mead.  Honey tastes a lot different in meads than it does on other things it seems.  Orange-blossom honey is popular.  Clover honey is good when mixed with fruits making the mead a melomel.

[Buzzing_Beard]

There's a new poll up for proposed bee mechanics.

Bee Poll #1:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

What honeybee mechanics do you want to see in DF? Five ideas to vote on:

Underground Beehives (it's the dwarven way)
    - 31 (26.1%)
Bee-Trees (riskier wood-chopping)
    - 27 (22.7%)
Embarkable Beehives (Buzz'n Beard says: "Bring Two!")
    - 15 (12.6%)
Top-Bar Hives (save the bees!)
    - 17 (14.3%)
Varietal Honeys (Mmmm... strawberry-honey mead)
    - 29 (24.4%)

Total Members Voted: 65