Print

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

[Sutremaine]

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.

Bees use any part of the existing animal code? Really?

But if they do, it doesn't matter too much anyway, because after 60 occupied hives you don't get any output. After 40 occupied hives there's a restricted output, although I don't know if there's any point at which the extra hives outpace the output restriction.

I have a stockpile for jugs and combs right next to the hives. Based on occasional complaints about soapmaking, it seems that some fiddling about with stockpiles gets things done quicker, but I don't know for sure. It's probably worth doing so anyway, since your hives are unlikely to be going anywhere and needing a new special stockpile. Half the hives are set to install and gather (the default, I think), and the other half are set to install but not gather.

[Marthnn]

Half the hives are set to install and gather (the default, I think), and the other half are set to install but not gather.

You might want to reconsider, make it maybe a third or quarter set to be saved for split. I currently have 14 Hives, with 10 set to gather. Yet they are all full of bees, all ready to be split (the 14 of them), and the only products to be gathered are in the 4 no-gather hives.

Production is obviously slower than split requirements.

[Lytha]

I've been doing fine with just 1 hive reserved for splitting, for the worst case scenario that the beekeeper gathers from all hives until there are none left. But this is unlikely to happen, since "install colony in hive" seems to have priority over "gather honey".

[Sutremaine]

Production is obviously slower than split requirements.

I wonder if splitting a hive slows production any?

Once I've got things a little more efficient I'll alter the number of 'reserved' hives. 50/50 is what I was using when expanding, and at that point I didn't know there was a limit.

[Korva]

Yes, this is how it is SUPPOSED to work. The thing is that it doesn't work for me in this version. Colonies are installed in newly-constructed hives, but that is it. I have jugs, I have a finished goods stockpile only for "tools" (and tools forbidden in the mail goods pile). I have one very skilled beekeeper -- who ignores the "gather products" setting. I just can't get him to actually process those hives. When I was fed up with it and had them torn down, the dwarves happily carted the resulting honeycombs to the stockpile, but that is the only way I can get honey. The beekeeper is happy to rebuild and repopulate the hives, but he never actually gathers from them.

For that matter, I've never seen a beekeeper split an existing hive even when I have hives set and ready to be split. They always run across the whole map to grab wild colonies. If I close all ways out of the fort, they still don't use my domestic hives ...

As I said, I love the idea of beekeeping, it just is perma-bugged for me for some infernal reason.

[Lytha]

Have you unglazed pottery jugs, per chance? Or perhaps your special stockpile setup messes things up? Or is your beekeeper always kept busy with more important things, such as attending parties, gathering plants, dumping rocks and other things like that?

All I can say is that beekeeping works perfectly for me, utilizing rock or wood jugs. And yes, the beekeeper will split existing hives. You can witness this by appointing two dwarves as beekeepers. After a while, one will have gathered products from a hive that the other wanted to split, and then the excessive spam will prove to you that yes, they do split the hives.

[Marthnn]

Are your jugs empty?

I've had problems with royal jelly jugs that no-one will eat or cook, can't dump the content, and yet they are stored in jug stockpiles (finished goods, only tools type accepted). To sort them out, get a food stockpile to accept only royal jelly, those jugs will be stored in barrels/pots.

[Girlinhat]

As for "beekeeping is inaccurate", give Toady some credit.  He always does research, even for seemingly trivial things that no one really cares about, like Lye and by extension Lye Makers.  In Ye Olden Days, a bee colony was destroyed upon collection due to primitive methods, this is like using a hoe and hard labor compared to a 50 foot wide multi-plow tractor.  These are also dwarves.  I suspect they scream at the bees until they all fold their little antennae back in shame and promptly shrivel up and die.  As for production quantity, well, much of the game suffers from this.  We have one log, which can be used for a wall tall enough for titans to pass by, yet small enough that it makes one earring.  The exact amount of productivity and size of materials is abstract and arbitrary at best, because things are still in development.

[Marthnn]

We have one log, which can be used for a wall tall enough for titans to pass by, yet small enough that it makes one earring.

Correction.
1 to 3 earrings.
Big difference there...

Anyway, considering the actual state of farming, we don't need another large source of food/booze.

[Lytha]

Are your jugs empty?

Ah, you are right. That's probably the issue. I've been running into this issue when I knew that I had dozens of honeycombs in my stockpile but the presser refused to press them.

Most likely, the beekeeper also will refuse to harvest the products from the hive when he has no empty jug available.

[wlerin]

Mead should have a higher value than it does now, anyway.

Mead *and* honey should have a higher value. The thing is, honey and mead have NO defined value in the raws, so they default to 1. Personally, I find this unacceptable. I'll be adding [MATERIAL_VALUE:3] post-haste.

[Lytha]

Mead *and* honey should have a higher value. The thing is, honey and mead have NO defined value in the raws, so they default to 1. Personally, I find this unacceptable. I'll be adding [MATERIAL_VALUE:3] post-haste.

This sounds reasonable. Where do you put this line?

Ah. I found it: creature_insect; and there somewhere in the products of the bees.

[Psieye]

It's a food stockpile you need, not a tools stockpile. Also, if your jugs are made of unglazed pottery or glass, they won't get used. Not sure why glass doesn't get used, but I never could get glass jugs to be filled.

[Lytha]

The jugs are always stored in my "finished goods" bins, though. Yes, even the jugs filled with jelly or honey.

Honeycombs definitely count as a "tool", not as food.

[Korva]

I've a lot of empty jugs. Porcelain, so I didn't think they would need glazing -- could that be it? Though that wouldn't explain why my beekeeper processed one hive in the very beginning. Eh, maybe I'll try again in this new fort.