Bee coming out of bee nest
Bees are neutral animals that will sting the player, in a swarm, if provoked and inflict poison.
Spawning
Natural generation
Bees spawn in groups around bee nests, found in plains, sunflower plains and flower forest biomes. Bee nest are often are found hanging from trees.
Behavior
Bees fly around their nests, being attracted by flowers. After circling a flower for a while a bee can collect pollen, which changes the texture of a bee to include pollen spots on its back. Bees with pollen also have pollen particles coming off them.
Once bees have collected pollen they can pollinate crops, causing them to advance one growth stage.
When a bee with pollen returns to its bee nest or bee hive this increases the nectar level of the nest or hive by one.
Bees follow players holding flowers, but stops following if the player stops holding the flower.
Bees will attack and swarm the player as a group when angered. Angered bees texture changes and causes the bees to have red eyes. All bees nearby are angered when one individual is attacked, or when a nest is destroyed. Collecting a honeycomb or a honey bottle from a nest or hive will cause the bees from said nest or hive to leave and swarm the player. One can prevent the bees from swarming the player by placing a Campfire below the hive.
After attacking and poisoning the player bees lose their stinger and die within 20 seconds, bees can therefore only attack once.
Bees do not attack other mobs when damaged, for example due to a skeleton shooting them.
Bees, despite being arthropods in real life, are not considered arthropods in Minecraft and do not take increased damage against the Bane of Arthropods enchantment.
Breeding
If bees are given a flower, they enter love mode and pair off to create baby bees, granting the player a small amount of experience. The parent bees have a cooldown of 5 minutes before they can breed again. All babies obtained by breeding take 20 minutes to grow up. The growth of baby bees can be slowly accelerated using flowers; each use takes 10% off of the remaining time to grow up.
Advancements
| Icon | Advancement | In-game description | Parent | Actual requirements (if different) | Resource location |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() | The Parrots and the Bats | Breed two animals together | Husbandry | Breed a pair of any of these 25 mobs:
| husbandry/breed_an_animal
|
Data values
Entity data
Bees have entity data associated with them that contains various properties of the mob.
- Entity data
- Additional fields for mobs that can become angry
- Additional fields for mobs that can breed
- Tags common to all entities
- Tags common to all mobs
- CannotEnterHiveTicks: Time left in ticks until the bee can enter a beehive. Used when the bee is angered and released from the hive by a player, but the hive is smoked by a campfire.
- CropsGrownSincePollination: How many crops the bee has grown since its last pollination. Used to limit number of crops it can grow.
- FlowerPos: Coordinates of the flower the bee is circling.
- X: X coordinate.
- Y: Y coordinate.
- Z: Z coordinate.
- HasNectar: 1 or 0 (true/false) - true if the bee is carrying pollen.
- HasStung: 1 or 0 (true/false) - true if the bee has stung a mob or player.
- HivePos: Coordinates of the bee's hive.
- X: X coordinate.
- Y: Y coordinate.
- Z: Z coordinate.
- TicksSincePollination: Number of ticks passed since the bee's last pollination.
History
| Upcoming Java Edition | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.15 | 19w34a | Added bees. | |||
Issues
Issues relating to "Bee" are maintained on the bug tracker. Report issues there.
Trivia
- Bees are the first flying insects and first flying neutral mobs introduced to Minecraft.
