Minecraft: Here’s How to Get Bees into a Beehive

Bees are absolutely essential in Minecraft if you plan on farming honey, and although they do naturally spawn in the world, primarily near forests and meadows, it’s much more convenient to have a beehive right in your backyard. You’ve constructed a beehive and you’re ready to harvest some honey, but the problem is, your beehive is vacant and there are no signs of life around. Luckily there are a couple of ways to lure bees to your beehive and today, we’re going to explain how.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated in October 2023 and reflects the mechanics that appear in the most recent version of the game.

How to craft a beehive & create a home for your future bees

Before you can get into bee farming, you need to have an acceptable home for them. But the thing is, even if you’re ready to take up beekeeping as a hobby in Minecraft you need to encounter bees in the wild first. Generally, your best course of action when you run into a bee nest in the wilderness is to either move the nest back to your location or harvest the honey so you can get your hands on a valuable honeycomb which will in turn allow you to house bees.

You cannot keep bees in the same location if you don’t have a beehive, as they will scatter around, so let’s see how to create one.

1. Open the crafting table.
2. Combine 6x wooden planks and 3x honeycombs in the central row.

Now that you have a beehive, it’s time to populate it with bees, let’s see how it’s done.

How to get bees into your beehive?

Generally, you have three options when it comes to populating your beehive with bees. You can lure them to your beehive, you can use lead on them and you can transfer an entire bee nest to your location. You can additional breed bees in order to increase the population, but that only works if you have bees around.

How to lure bees to your beehive?

Bees are generally easily lured to beehives by using flowers, and what’s best, any type of flower works. All you need to do is stand near the wild bee nest with a flower in your hand and it will attract the wild pollinators and cause at least one bee to follow you to whichever location you would like.

Can you use a lead on a bee?

Leads can absolutely be used on bees and you can utilize them to lead bees directly to the location where you want them to breed and populate your beehives. All you need to do is prepare a lead and left-click on a bee with the lead equipped.

How to transfer a bee nest to your location?

If you want to gain a large number of bees your best bet is to simply move the wild bee nest to the location of your choice. You can do this by breaking a nest with a tool enchanted by a silk touch, or by using a campfire.

To harvest a bee nest with silk touch, follow these steps:

1. Wait for night when bees are in the nests, minimizing the possibility of the attacks.
2. Break the nest with a tool enchanted with Silk Touch should it drop to the ground like a block and appear in your inventory once you collect it.

You can breed bees with flowers

If you’ve managed to attract at least two bees to your location, but you would like for the bee population to go up in size, you can always breed them just like any other animal. To do it, follow these steps:

1. Equip any type of flower.
2. Approach the bee and click on it while holding the flower.
3. Hearts should appear over bees indicating that they are in the mating mode.
4. A new, smaller bee should spawn.

And remember, to ensure that your bees won’t migrate to a new place or despawn, take good care of them. Plant plenty of flowers in the vicinity, this has chances of attracting both new bees and your bees spontaneously entering mating mode. Expand your beehive number occasionally to increase the population size and the amounts of honey that you can collect.

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