Print

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

[Mount]

As it currently stands, beekeeping is kind of redundant..  It produces mead, sure, but there's easier, faster ways to get my drink on.  I'm not sure how useful waxworking is, either.  BUT!  I have some ideas to make beekeeping more useful, though it might be truer to say I'd like to expand it into a more general "entomology" field. 

We've got wild bee colonies, yes, but we've got other insect vermin that just aren't pulling their weight.  Imagine if you could gather an ant colony into a container, and give a dwarf a "pet" ant farm.  Butterflies could be "farmed" as a beautiful social area.. or for brightly-colored butterfly-wing cloaks for your nobles.  Moths could be farmed to produce a non-spider variety of silk (actual silkworms are the larvae of a moth, after all)  Wasps or africanized bees could be made into "trap hives" and installed near your entrance to bedevil your foes.  How awesome would it be to have a titan or forgotten beast show up, only to be stung to death by 50 hives worth of hornets before your military can even show up?  Fireflies could be gathered into glass "lanterns" and used to illuminate dark mines (or just to liven up your dining area)  Worms could be released into your farms to improve the soil. 

You could even extend the idea into more fantasical realms.  Mix in alchemy, and you could get giant dragonflies as mounts.  Or ground pixies, stored in tubes as a delicious treat!  (mmm pixie sticks..)

EDIT:  Just for the record, this whole post is NOT just a long windup to a Pixie Sticks joke.  I actually would like to see some expansion of function in the keeping of bees.  Thoughts?

[lanceleoghauni]

IIRC Wax is still broken and never seems to be taken out of the hive, so you only ever get honey and Royal Jelly from it. Not that you necessarily NEED wax, but it'd be cool to have, maybe to build a Dwarven-Hive, built entirely out of wax blocks.

[EmperorJon]

Huh? I've had wax before.

Anyway, I must agree though, currently you get a TINY amount of wax, honey, royal jelly, etc. for the amount of time. It's just not a good industry.

[simonthedwarf]

Huh? I've had wax before.

Anyway, I must agree though, currently you get a TINY amount of wax, honey, royal jelly, etc. for the amount of time. It's just not a good industry.

But you can just build more Hives?

[Mushroo]

I would  love to see beehives give a pollination bonus to nearby farm plots (similar to the fertilizer bonus of potash).

[_DivideByZero_]

You can just build more hives. A lot more.

Like, try making around 30 or so. It won't stand up to farming, that's true, but it's still a nice change of pace from the typical plump helmet farm.

[Noodz]

Beekeeping is more of a personal challenge, given how much work goes into so little reward. It also doesn't help that mead is as valuable as sewer brew.

[Gergination]

The problem I had with beekeeping is that my beekeeper was obsessed with collecting wild hives instead of splitting the ones I had set up for him.  Couple this with the fact there's a hard limit to the number of hives you can have and it really is an industry not worth bothering with.

Mead needs to be more valuable for sure and wax should have some valuable use outside of making low value crafts.

[Sutremaine]

IIRC Wax is still broken and never seems to be taken out of the hive

That's the way it works. Hive products are a honeycomb and royal jelly, and the honeycomb is processed into honey and wax cake. Mead at least need to be more valuble, and an option to process five combs into 25 mead in a single barrel would be nice. Mead barrels take up rather a lot of space in a stockpile.

Wild hives will eventually be supplanted, although this takes a while. There are a certain number of natural vermin colonies that a map can support, and each honey bee colony removed is a chance for a non-honeybee colony to spring up.

[Berserkenstein]

You can just build more hives. A lot more.

Like, try making around 30 or so. It won't stand up to farming, that's true, but it's still a nice change of pace from the typical plump helmet farm.

I have a bee keeping industry with more than 30 hives and it still takes an awful long time to make just 6 mead.  I think masterwork wax items are like 120 dwarf bucks and you don't get very many, skull totems are worth more, and you get more skulls in the same time.  I don't even sell totems, I put them in single row stockpiles with bins set to 0 as a warning to would-be invaders or migrants.

[_DivideByZero_]

Ah, well that's disappointing. You can always mod them to create hive products faster if you're not going for realism. It's the big number in the [HIVE_PRODUCT] tag. Divide that by 4 or 8 or 12 and you'll see a corresponding increase in production. It *should* work in an already generated world.

[slothen]

wax seems to work fine, my problem with beekeeping is that cooks don't use royal jelly all that much, so all my jugs get caught up storing that which clutters my kitchen stockpiles, and once the jugs are gone they stop harvesting new hives.  If I export the jugs of jelly I still have to make new jugs, also I don't much value from the jugs, as a masterwork jug is 120, and with royal jelly the worth is 121.  The low value of royal jelly plus the problems it causes with jugs makes me want to not bother.  The wax crafts are kind of cool though.

[Cespinarve]

wax seems to work fine, my problem with beekeeping is that cooks don't use royal jelly all that much, so all my jugs get caught up storing that which clutters my kitchen stockpiles, and once the jugs are gone they stop harvesting new hives.  If I export the jugs of jelly I still have to make new jugs, also I don't much value from the jugs, as a masterwork jug is 120, and with royal jelly the worth is 121.  The low value of royal jelly plus the problems it causes with jugs makes me want to not bother.  The wax crafts are kind of cool though.

ARGH! My top three DF issues: 1) THAT BLOODY ROYAL JELLY THAT THEY NEVER USE 2)BAgs not being separate from cabinets and 3) The stagnant water glitch that makes lye unusable all the fraking time.

[Togre]

Is there any way to use hives as weapons?  If you drop them on enemies or drop enemies (or prisoners....or kitties) onto hives do they get stung a bunch?

[_DivideByZero_]

Bees will sting anything, including enemies (They definitely sting wild animals, I've seen it happen.). The problem is that in reality the sting doesn't do all that much.

However, if you use my zombees instead...