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Minecraft Java update adds bees, honey farming, harmony, hope

(Image credit: Mojang)

Bees! They're in Minecraft now, part of the 1.15 Java Edition update. A new neutral mob, bees are pretty chill, as chill as they are in real life. Check out the full patch notes to see exactly how they behave, but the notes essentially read like a description of what bees already do in the real world. 

According to Mojang, Minecraft's bees are cute and fuzzy and they'll only hurt you if you hurt them. They like flowers and spend their lives gathering pollen. They help your crops grow. They don't like rain. They'll die if they sting you, dropping nothing. They just die scared and alone and it's your fault if they do. 

You know, typical bee stuff.

But there are no bees without bee nests and bee hives, two important components of the 1.15 update. These suckers don't just house bees, of course, they house that icky-sticky, that liquid gold, nature's nectar, that sweet stuff we call "honey". 

Nests spawn naturally throughout the world and if a bee completes a circuit from flower to nest, the honey level will increase until it reaches level five. Sounds dangerously sticky. I'm talking Pooh-Bear's-cold-corpse-stuck-in-the-pot sticky. 

Hives are player constructed nests, comprised of honeycomb and wood. Build a few in tandem with a garden for healthy ecosystem points, a thing I just made up. But because bees spread pollen and making pollen trips between hive and plants juices honey production and crop growth, players are capable of making some super efficient farms now. You can even blow smoke on the little buggers to calm them down. 

A new honey bottle item will let players collect honey to drink (good lord) or craft into sugar, while the new dispensers make for easy collection, filling, and honeycomb shearing. Minecraft is just Stardew Valley now. I'm ready to build a honey and mayonnaise utopia. 
