Updated to 1.20
A Beehive full of Bees represents an infinite source of Honey and Honeycombs that you don’t want to lose. Once placed, you can’t just break it if you want to move it to another place with all its Bees.
To move a Beehive or Bee Nest, you will need to break it with a Silk Touch enchanted tool. If there were Bees inside it, they will remain inside when it drops. If you break a Beehive or Bee Nest without using Silk Touch, nothing will drop.
Today we are going to see where to find Bee Nests, how to craft a Beehive, how to get Silk Touch and how to move Bees from a Bee Nest or from a Beehive to another Beehive. Let’s start!
Where to find Bee Nests
Bees are a passive Minecraft mob that you will see flying around their Nest. If you harm them or if you harm their Nest, they will become hostile and attack you. They will also die 10 seconds after attacking, just like real life bees.
During the day, Bees fly from their Nest to Flowers to get pollen. Their look will change when they are carrying pollen: their back will turn from full brown to brown with some white spots.
When they carry the pollen, there is a chance that they drop it. If pollen is dropped on Grass or crops (like Wheat for example), it will act like Bone Meal and make the Grass or crops advance one growth stage.
You can find Bee Nests attached to trees in the following biomes:
- Birch Forest
- Flower Forest
- Forest
- Mangrove Swamp
- Meadow
- Old Growth Birch Forest
- Plains
- Sunflower Plains
In Meadow there is a 100% of finding Bee Nests, while it is not always a certainty in the other ones. So if you want to find a Bee Nest, you should try to go to a Meadow. If you can’t find any Meadow, you can try to use the command /locate biome. You just need to open the commands and type:
/locate biome minecraft:meadow
And you’ll see a message appearing with the coordinates ot the closest Meadow.
To know your coordinates instead, you just need to press F3 and you will see this:
How to craft a Beehive
You can move Bees from a Bee Nest to a Beehive. The Beehive is the artificial version of the nest and it is basically the same, from a gameplay point of view.
To craft a Beehive you will need 6 Wooden Planks (of any kind of wood) and 3 Honeycombs.
You can get Honeycombs from Bee Nests. When a nest is at its maximum honey level it will look like this:
You can notice golden particles dripping from the Bee Nest to the ground. if a Bee Nest or Beehive is at its maximum honey level, you can use Shears on it (right-click on the Bee Nest while holding Shears in your hand) to get 3 Honeycombs.
You can see what you can do with Honeycombs (aka Wax) in How to get Wax in Minecraft?.
Be careful because the Bees inside the Bee Nest will turn hostile if you harvest it, so you’d better run if you don’t want to kill them.
To craft Shears you will need 2 Iron Ingots:
If you want to prevent the Bees from turning hostile when you take the Honeycombs, you can calm them with the smoke coming from a Campfire. To craft a Campfire you will need 3 Sticks, 3 Wooden Logs (of any kind of wood) and 1 Coal or Charcoal (related: Charcoal vs Coal in Minecraft: are they any different?):
To smoke a BeeNest or Beehive, just place the Campfire close to it.
How to move a Beehive in Minecraft with Silk Touch
To move a Beehive or Bee Nest, you will need to break it with a Silk Touch enchanted tool. If there were Bees inside it, they will remain inside when it drops. If you break a Beehive or Bee Nest without using Silk Touch, nothing will drop.
If you want to know how to get Silk Touch and every other enchantment, you can check here.
Keep in mind that in Minecraft Bedrock edition, the Bees outside a Bee Nest or Beehive will turn hostile even if you use a Silk Touch enchanted tool. So you may want to smoke them, as explained above.
How to move Bees
To move Bees from a Bee Nest or from a Beehive to another Beehive, you need to turn the Bees into homeless Bees and use Flowers. If you are holding any Flower in your hand, Bees will follow you. Then you need to lead them to a Beehive.
Turning the Bees homeless is not very simple. If you want to seee how to do it, you can check the following video.
Conclusions
So, there you have it. To move a Bee Nest or a Beehive you need to break it with a Silk Touch enchanted tool. If you are playing on the Bedrock edition, make sure to use a Campfire to calm the Bees. A Campfire turns very useful also when you want to move Bees or when you want to get Honey and Honeycombs from a Beehive. Thank you very much for reading the article this far and I hope I’ll see you again around here. See you and take care!