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[Korva]

Argh! I cannot get the beekeeping industry to work in this version. I had one 31.21 test fort in which it semi-worked aside from the lag issues and the beekeeper's refusal to use anything but wild colonies to repopulate hives instead of splitting "domesticated" ones. Now nothing I tried helps. My beekeeper processed ONE hive in the very first year, that is all. Ten years and as many hives later, which have been de- and reconstructed several times, I give up. I have jugs aplenty, I have food stockpiles ready to accept honey and jelly. I have a master beekeeper, and only that dwarf has the labor enabled. My hives are bursting with bees and honey. Yet the beekeeper does eff-all after populating the hives right after construction.

Any help? I like the idea of having honey for meals and mead, but damn this is buggy ...

[Naryar]

Pointless. Too much bother. I usually use whip vines that give more valuable alcohol than any other existing thing in DF.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Pointless. Too much bother. I usually use whip vines that give more valuable alcohol than any other existing thing in DF.

...Sunberries?

[EBannion]

Pointless. Too much bother. I usually use whip vines that give more valuable alcohol than any other existing thing in DF.

...Sunberries?

Seconded.

[Naryar]

Statement that I will answer with a question : Have you ever seen a sun berry since 0.31.19 ?

[Girlinhat]

Sunberries are broken, along with sliver barb.  The [GOOD] and [EVIL] tag doesn't work on ANY plants, except grass apparently.  So good/evil trees and plants will never appear in game.  I'm personally modded these out, so they appear in their respective biomes.  I can usually buy them both from elves.  Sunberries and Strawberries make for great crops that can be eaten raw, and cycling them ensures you never get the "tired of the same old booze" effect.

Also, I'm likely to add an extract for Sunberries in my next world.  Liquid Happiness...

[Hyndis]

Sunberries and Strawberries make for great crops that can be eaten raw, and cycling them ensures you never get the "tired of the same old booze" effect.

You can do this with underground crops as well. My brewery room has 2 stills, with 2x3 of stockpile space between the stills. 1x3 stockpile accepts only one type of plant, the other 1x3 stockpile accepts another type of plant but nothing else. Since brewers pick the closest plant to brew this means that I can pick what they brew.

My favorites are dwarven ale and dwarven beer.

Two types of booze is enough so they won't get tired of it. Should the 2x3 of plants for the brewery be exhausted they'll grab the next closest plant, which is probably a plump helmet, so some win will also be made until the brewery stockpiles are refilled, but this just adds in variety for a third type of booze so its all good.

Another option is to put the farmed plant stockpiles further away from the non-farmed plant stockpiles, so your breweries will preferentially brew imported plants over natively grown plants. Just buy up plants from the elven and human caravans and you'll get a huge variety of booze from imported plants. Once the imported stuff has all been brewed it'll be back to dwarven ale and beer.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Serious derailment here--does anyone have input on running bees? I haven't gotten much use of out them either, but whip vines being easier is just not dwarfy! easy is dull, easy is not how soap gets made and loincloths get dyed, bees are hard, therefore a fort must be run entirely on bees, but how?

[Girlinhat]

Bees ultimately fail due to the 50-limit cap on animals.  When 50 animals are present on the map, that type of animal will stop breeding, but any existing pregnancies will continue.  Thus, you may only have 50 beehives at any given time.  25 for splitting, 25 for harvesting.  That's not enough to really -do- anything with.

[Korva]

I'd be glad if I could even get one hive out of my current ten to work.  It just bugs me that they've sat there for ten years, bees humming about, taunting me. Guess it's best to put beekeeping on hold until it's fixed.

[Scaraban]

I'd be glad if I could even get one hive out of my current ten to work.  It just bugs me that they've sat there for ten years, bees humming about, taunting me. Guess it's best to put beekeeping on hold until it's fixed.

Must resist, pun... too... powerful!

[Lytha]

Alright, bee keeping.

You need to be in a biome that supports natural beehives, else you can't do any bee keeping at all. No bees in Tundras, Oceans or Glaciers. Not sure about Mountains, since these are now covered with a tiny amount of soil and grass.

First step: Assign ONE bee keeper. Never have more than ONE bee keeper at all times. If you have more than ONE, they will interfere with each other's jobs, like gathering the honey and the jelly from the hive that the other bee keeper wanted to split.

Next: Produce some hives at your Craftsdorf's workshop. Place them somewhere; you only need to know in that regard that they need access to outdoors. If they're on a subterranean tile adjacent to a ramp leading outside, they're fine. You can probably dig a very deep shaft downwards and install the hives in z=0, too, if you want to.

Now, wait that the bee keeper goes to a natural hive, grabs the 12k bees with the help of his beard, and installs them into one of your hives. If you have more natural hives, he will slowly install them into the other hives as well; if you don't have any more natural hives on your map (perhaps because you've walled yourself in), then you will have to wait for a few months until the first hive is ready to be split. In such a case, make sure to "q" over your first hive and to de-select "gather honey from this hive".

During the next 6 months, nothing much will happen except that your cats and dwarves will occasionally get stung by bees. If you like this, place your 1x1 meeting zone right next to the bee hives.

Utilize this time to produce a bunch of jugs at the Craftsdorf's workshop.

After around half a year, the bee hives will be ready to be harvested or to be split. The ONE bee keeper will grab a jug, fill it with the jelly, and place the filled jug and a honeycomb into the "finished goods" stockpile. Why Toady thinks that a hive is destroyed when you gather honey from it, is frankly beyond me. He probably just doesn't know anything about bee keeping.

Then, the bee keeper will -without you having to do any micromanaging to guide him- walk to either a natural hive or a hive that is ready to be split, grab some thousand bees with the help of his beard, and install them.

That's it.

You don't have to micromanage anything, you don't have to de- and reinstall the hives. Just let the little bugger do his job. As long as there is only one bee keeper, he will do this very well.


You then need a screw press to extract the honey from the honeycomb (again, this is definitely not how it's done in real life), and you will end up with a second jug filled with honey, and a glob of wax. Feel free to craft some wax crafts at the craftsdorf now, and sell, cook or turn the honey into mead. Mead should have a higher value than it does now, anyway.

[Angel Of Death]

I'd be glad if I could even get one hive out of my current ten to work.  It just bugs me that they've sat there for ten years, bees humming about, taunting me. Guess it's best to put beekeeping on hold until it's fixed.

Must resist, pun... too... powerful!

ARGH! I FEEL THE BUZZ OF THE PUNS POWER TOO!
D:

[Marthnn]

Why Toady thinks that a hive is destroyed when you gather honey from it, is frankly beyond me. He probably just doesn't know anything about bee keeping.
(...)
You then need a screw press to extract the honey from the honeycomb (again, this is definitely not how it's done in real life), and you will end up with a second jug filled with honey, and a glob of wax.

There's a difference between Modern beekeeping and beekeeping in a Medieval-like society. Check your History. Those methods were used at some point.

[Lytha]

Those woven hives they used some hundred years ago? Possible that they really had to destroy the hive to gather the products from it, indeed.

But I don't see how pressing would work at all. Even worse: Then you get the larvae and dead bees pressed into the honey, and that definitely makes them even harder to filter out. Well, this may explain the low value of the Dwarf Fortress honey and the mead. Larvae goo. :p

The quantities involved into all of this, like "1 jug filled with jelly and exactly 1 jug filled with honey for the life of an entire hive" still indicate to me that he doesn't know much about bee keeping. We get ~12 jugs of honey from a hive per year and that does not involve killing it off.