Tutorials/Honey farming

Honey farming is the process of collecting honey bottles and honeycombs from beehives. Honey bottles are food items that are able to cure poison, and can also be used for crafting sugar and honey blocks, the latter of which have sticky properties that give them a variety of useful applications. Honeycomb is used for crafting your own beehives for bees to inhabit, as well as for creating decorative honeycomb blocks.

Honey bottles
Honey bottles can be farmed using glass bottles and beehives or bee nests. Bees will fly around a flower to collect pollen. If they carry the pollen back to their hive, then the honey level of the hive will be raised. You can also put a campfire under the beehive to calm the bees while collecting honey. To collect honey bottles from the hive, just right click the beehive or bee nest with glass bottles. Bees can inflict damage when beehive is destroyed or honey is collected

Honeycombs
Honeycombs can be farmed using shears on full beehives or full bee nests.

Automatic Harvesting
Dispensers can be used to harvest honey bottles and honeycomb from a hive using a redstone signal. The opening of the dispenser must be pointing towards the beehive, and the dispenser must contain glass bottles to collect honey bottles, or shears to collect honeycomb. Collecting honey bottles will place the item directly into the dispenser, whereas collecting honeycomb will cause the items to drop onto the floor. Dispensers will deplete the durability of the shears with every use. Note that harvesting from the hives using dispensers will not anger the bees, so placing campfires underneath them is not necessary if you are choosing to harvest this way. Redstone comparators are able to output a redstone signal from a beehive based on the honey level of the hive. Every time a bee exits the hive after having worked with the pollen it has collected, the honey level will increase by 1. Each honey level increases the redstone output from a redstone comparator by 1, to a maximum of 5, which is when the hive will change appearance and indicate it is ready for harvest. By using this mechanic, one can set up a system with the output signal to activate a dispenser once the hive is full of honey to immediately gather the product of your choice.

Honey Bottles
When a dispenser collects honey from a beehive or bee nest, a honey bottle will be placed into its inventory. In order to extract the honey bottles from a dispenser in a lossless fashion, the best way to do so is to set up an item sorter underneath the dispenser to collect only honey bottles. 8/9 slots of the dispenser should be filled with as many glass bottles as possible, leaving one space empty for the honey bottles to go after the dispenser activates. The more glass bottles that are loaded into the dispenser, the longer this system is able to operate automatically before the dispenser requires restocking with more glass bottles.