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Beekeeping for beginners

PostPosted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 9:47 pm
by Catote
I have lost all my bees. So now I must ask for help again.
This is what I did: collect 1 queen and 6 drones. Put them in bee skep. Look after them every 24 hours. Have lost all drones over some days. Usually 1 or 2 at the time. Once found an evil bee and removed it. But basically I never attracted new ones. Now, I have just the queen left. AND did the same thing over again buying 6 new drones. But same result. So obviously something is wrong...
Advice?

Re: Beekeeping for beginners

PostPosted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 11:04 pm
by Taipion
Catote wrote:I have lost all my bees. So now I must ask for help again.
This is what I did: collect 1 queen and 6 drones. Put them in bee skep. Look after them every 24 hours. Have lost all drones over some days. Usually 1 or 2 at the time. Once found an evil bee and removed it. But basically I never attracted new ones. Now, I have just the queen left. AND did the same thing over again buying 6 new drones. But same result. So obviously something is wrong...
Advice?


First off, bee keeping is bound to luck, so you should never rely on a single skep, instead you should have at least 5-10 to never run the risk of losing all your worker bees, or running out of queens.

Second, it is right that you should not look more often than once every 24h, but looking a little less often than that might help, too.

I once was on vacation for 3 weeks and when I came back, I still had enough workers and queens in total to fill all my skeps up again.

Re: Beekeeping for beginners

PostPosted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 1:28 am
by lachlaan
I was under the impression that checking the skep stops them producing either honey or worker bees or both, but not necessarily spawning new drones. Like Taipion said you likely had some bad luck, keep spamming flowers and go for more drones. I usually park my skeps at 9 drones and a queen or more if i know I'll be checking often enough to empty out jelly and new queens so it's not overcrowded.

Re: Beekeeping for beginners

PostPosted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 7:51 am
by Chrumps
lachlaan wrote:keep spamming flowers

That is totally wrong
Instead I suspect having a map tile loaded has something to do with it.
lachlaan wrote:I usually park my skeps at 9 drones and a queen

That is a good setup.

One thing you must be aware is both drones and queens have limited lifespan. Queens live couple times longer than drones but they eventually die anyway.
If you collect your drones from flowers yourself you will have full lifespan guaranteed, even if there is some random variation.
If you buy your drones from someone else's skeps they have already lived a part of their life and no one is able to tell how much of it is gone.
You need to have some number of worker bees to start producing drones but given the fact you found a delphic bee there is already a small chance of producing drones.

Re: Beekeeping for beginners

PostPosted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 12:40 pm
by lachlaan
Keep spamming flowers in the sense that he should go pick flowers if he doesn't want to buy more drones xD wander, pick flowers, spawn bees, fill a few skeps cheaper than going to the market. Also wandering is fun.

My bad for the easy to misunderstand wording, indeed planting flowers in pots won't help your bee birthrate at all, nor will anything else aside from chance from what i know. We still lack bee viagra.

Re: Beekeeping for beginners

PostPosted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 5:17 pm
by Catote
Cool. Thanks a bunch. Will give it another try. Have almost found enough drones for a new test. I was afraid, I had missed something important.