Productive Bees

Mod

by LobsterJonn

Get your resource fix from bees

Type

Mod

CurseForge Downloads

45,221,202

CurseForge ID

377897

Modrinth Downloads

222,931

Modrinth ID

jH6iiqkd

Last Updated

Jun 11, 2026

Description

Productive Bees builds on the content added by Minecraft 1.15 and adds additional bees and advanced beehives allowing you to put your bees to work creating resources in a fully automated setup. Productive bees are just as derpy as their vanilla cousins, but makes up for it in usefulness and beeuty. This mod adds bees for most vanilla resources as well as all your favorite modded resources like copper, lead, silver etc. There are also a lot of bees for mod specific resources like Mystical Agriculture essence, Silents Gems, Powah, Tinkers Construct, Thermal and many more. In total you can find more than 200 bees if the relevant mods are installed. We also add up to 32 variants of a new advanced beehives for the bees to live in, most of which are made from wood added by other mods. The mod is fully customizable, you can add your own bees, disable existing bees and change the production resources and rates. It is recommended to use JEI for looking up breeding recipes and Patchouli for ingame documentation. If you have questions check the FAQ below or hop on over to the discord server FAQ

Q: Why do my bees not go into my hive?
- Most of the bees found in the overworld are solitary bees and will not live in a hive. They need nests to live in, don't produce resources and are mostly used for breeding other bees.
- Each bee has specific flower requirements, make sure they are met. Flower requirements can bee seen in JEI by right clicking or pressing 'U' on the bee
- If your bees were living in a different hive, they might still remember it as their home. Put the bee in a cage and release it while sneaking next to the new hive.
- If all else fails, try breaking the hive and place it again. Bees stay in the hive when broken, no need for silk touch.
- If you have Radium installed, add this to the radium config file

mixin.ai.poi=false

Q: How to get X bee?
- Most of the bees are obtained from breeding two other bees together, recipes for breeding can be found in JEI or the Big Book of Bees.
- Solitary and wild bees are obtained from nests found around the world. You can make a new bee move into a nest by placing the nest in the right biome and then use one or more Honey Treats on the nest. Each additional treat will lower the countdown by 10%.

Q: How to get a Neon Cuckoo or a Nomad Bee
- Neon Cuckoo and Nomad bees are cuckoo bees and will only spawn from nests of other bees. Neon Cuckoo bee will spawn from the nest of a Blue Banded Bee and Nomad bees from the nest of an Ashy Mining Bee. There's a chance for a cuckoo bee to spawn each time the other bee brings back nectar, so make sure you have flowers around.

Q: How do I get Skeletal or Zombees
- Skeletal and ZomBees spawn during the night in empty advanced hives left in the dark
- The spawn rate is rather low, so set up 6-8 hives in the dark and make sure the hives are chunkloaded
- Vanilla hives can't be used

Q: JEI is not showing all the bees
- The bees are not always indexed in JEI the first time. If you are an op you can run the /reload command
- If you are not op, it usually works to disconnect and connect again

Q: I can't find vanilla bees!!!
from Minecraft wiki:
"As of Java Edition 1.15.2, occupied bee nests additionally have a 5% chance to spawn on oak or birch trees in any biome that were grown from saplings within two blocks of any flower at the same y-level. With a bit of luck and a large enough supply of oak or birch saplings and bone meal, one can obtain bees relatively easily without having to travel, by repeatedly growing trees near flowers until one spawns a bee nest as it grows. This is also an ideal way to obtain bees in older worlds created prior to Java Edition 1.15, as it saves players from having to locate anything."

Q: How do I summon and kill bees
Most of the bees are NBT based and will need more detailed commands to summon and kill
- /kill @e[type=productivebees:configurable_bee, name="Diamond Bee"]
- /summon productivebees:configurable_bee ~ ~ ~ {"type":"productivebees:diamond"}

Q: How do I get bee genes for the Incubator
Put a piston above a bottler with bottles in it, squash the bee you want the genes of and you get a bottle of squashed bee. Put that in the centrifuge and you get the different bee attributes as genes as well as a bee type gene.
Type genes can be combined with a honey treat and used in the Incubator to make spawn eggs of that type.
The other genes can be put on honey treats and fed to other bees to transfer the attributes.
You can also use the pokey pokey upgrade in a hive to peacefully and slowly extract genes
or just use a command
/give @p productivebees:gene{productivebees_gene_purity:100,productivebees_gene_attribute:"productivebees:crystalline",productivebees_gene_value:0}

Q: How to get Nocturnal and Metaturnal bees
Leash a Diurnal bee to something during night and it has a chance to turn Nocturnal
Leash a Nocturnal bee during day and it has a chance to turn Metaturnal
Be careful though as they can take damage with leashed in an environment they are not accustomed to

Q: How to improve weather tolerance
Leash a bee outside during rain or storm and the bee might become accustomed to the weather
Be careful as it may take damage while leashed in a hostile environment