Bee

Bees are neutral mobs that live in bee nests and beehives. If provoked, bees attack in a swarm to sting the player and inflict poison.

Natural generation
Naturally generated bee nests generate with 3 bees in them.

$$, bee nests generate in the following biomes with different chances:

$$, bee nests generate hanging from naturally-generated oak and birch trees found in, and  biomes. A tree in these biomes has a 5% chance to have a bee nest.

Bee nests are most commonly found in the flower forest biome because of its high tree density.

Saplings
Oak and birch trees grown from saplings that are within 2 blocks of any flower have a 5% chance to grow with bee nest and 1-3 bees in it.

Drops
Upon death, adult bees drop orbs when killed by a player or tamed wolf.

Upon successful breeding, is dropped.

Like other baby animals, killing a baby bee yields no experience.

Behavior
Bees do not fly (like ghasts or the ender dragon), but instead hover a few blocks above the ground similar to bats.

Bees are considered arthropods and take increased damage against the Bane of Arthropods enchantment. They also take damage when touching water.

Bees can be attached to a lead, even when angered. They can still attack while attached.

Pollinating
Bees leave their nest one by one during the day. They fly around their nests, and are attracted by flowers and sweet berry bushes. After circling a flower or berry bush for a while, a bee collects pollen. A bee carrying pollen changes its texture to include pollen spots on its back and drops pollen particles similar to water droplets falling.

Bees that have pollen pollinate wheat, potatoes, carrots, beetroots, melon stems, pumpkin stems and sweet berry bushes they fly over. When one of these plants gets pollinated, it advances to another growth stage, similar to using bone meal. In order to pollinate a plant, the particles that drop must touch it directly. A bee can fertilize plants 10 times each time they have pollen, and there is a small wait time between pollinating each plant.

Housing


Bees live together in colonies and take any beehive that has enough space as its home. One beehive can house up to 3 bees. Homeless bees wander around searching for empty beehives. Bees can enter a beehive from any side, but exit only from the front. One-way bee-gates can be made in this way.

Bees return to their nest when it rains and when it is night. Bees stay in their nest or hive for at least 2400 game tick before coming back out. Bees that come out keep their data (health, name, etc).

Breaking a nest or hive that contains bees releases all the bees. If a bee nest containing bees is harvested using a tool enchanted with Silk Touch, the bees inside are kept, with their respective data, in the hive, and they can exit the hive again when it is placed.

When a bee that has pollen enters and then leaves its nest or hive, the honey level of the nest/hive is increased by one. When the honey level of that hive reaches 5, the player can harvest it.

Attacking
Bees attack and swarm the player as a group when angered.

All bees nearby are angered when an individual bee is attacked or when a beehive is destroyed. Hitting or walking on a nest does not anger bees; only destroying a beehive angers bees. When destroyed, a beehive releases any bees inside, and the bees become angered. If the beehive is destroyed with a Silk Touch tool, the bees inside stay within the hive and stay neutral, even if the hive is placed again. However, bees outside, nearby the hive will become angry.

Furthermore, collecting a honeycomb or a honey bottle from a nest or hive causes any bees from that nest to become angered. To harvest hives without angering any bees, a campfire must be placed below the hive or nest when harvesting. Lighting any block below a hive or nest also works.

Bees do not attack players in Peaceful difficulty.

When a bee successfully attacks a player, the player becomes poisoned. Afterwards, the bee loses its stinger and cannot attack anymore. When a bee loses its stinger, it dies in approximately one minute. This duration is not hard-coded into the game, so the death of bees can be delayed with potions (Regeneration/Resistance/Absorption) that have a potency of 255.

It is possible to (quickly) breed at least one angered bee with another bee, even if it had lost its stinger. However, the bees still remain stinger-less and angered; the bees will still die after one minute due to being stinger-less.

If the player deflects a bee's attack with a shield, the bee continues attacking until it successfully hits the player.

Breeding
Bees follow players holding flowers. If the player is standing still and being followed by bees, the bees go toward the player, face the player, and rest on the ground. They do this until the player moves.

If bees are given a flower, they enter love mode and pair up to create baby bees, granting the player 1-7 experience. The parent bees have a cool down of 5 minutes before they can breed again. Babies take 20 minute to grow up. The growth of baby bees can be accelerated using flowers; each use reduces the remaining time by 10%. It should be noted, however, that both the breeding cooldown timer and the growing-up timer do not count down while bees are in a hive; thus, actively working bees may take much longer to grow up or be ready to breed compared to other mobs.

The flower can be any of the 1- or 2-block flowers. The wither rose, which is ordinarily harmful, has no harmful effect when used like this.

Entity data
Bees have entity data associated with them that contains various properties of the mob.

Trivia

 * Bees are the first flying arthropods and first flying neutral mobs introduced to Minecraft. The other arthropods are silverfish, endermites, spiders, and cave spiders.
 * Bees are the only arthropod mob that can exist in peaceful difficulty and are not necessary to earn the Monster Hunter / Monsters Hunted advancements as they completely passive.
 * Bees were made to be half a block in size because Mojang considered this size to be the cutest.
 * Bees pollinate the top half of sunflower blocks.
 * $$, bees fly faster when swarming a player or a mob.
 * In real life, baby bees look nothing like their adult counterpart but are larvae instead.
 * Despite inflicting poison on the player, real-life bees are venomous, not poisonous.