Apiary
Allows you to keep bees, which produce honey and beeswax. When first built, the apiary is empty and must attract a queen bee before it begins producing. When harvested, the apiary may lose half its bees (max is 1000), slowing production of the next batch. An apiary produces at most 10 honey and 10 beeswax between harvests.
The Hive Optimization tech allows the creation of essential extract, which will triple beeswax production in an apiary for 12 hours, at the expense of all honey production for the same period.
Apiaries only hold their latest yield - generally 10 beeswax, and 10 honey. If you check again before removing what is there, the previous quantity will be lost.
To build:
Costs:
Built: outside
Skill/Tech required: Beekeeping
Comments
While we all like having apiaries, please remember that 'minefields' of beehives can be irritating to other players, causing noise and lag. By the end of T2, the number of these was a genuine nuisance, especially to those with lower-end computers. There really is no need to space the things over hundreds of coords, folks. Lets nip this issue in the bud and build responsibly. :D - Tilapya
- It seems that bees will only move into an Apiary if it is in a low traffic area. Find a location out of the way (on top of a hill, etc.) and type "/crowd". A number <30% is ideal, and <20% is even better. After you build it, don't check it for a queen until about 48 hours later. Only check it for wax and honey every 24 hours to prevent crowding the area. Thanks to Sahar for the info :) -AdrianConrad
- In Tale1, an ideally situated apiary would have fully regenerated in 4hrs
- In Tale1, the speed stat would affect whether or not bees were lost when checking the apiary.
- Still true. With higher speeds you're more likely to receive "Due to your quick speed no bees escaped" messages.
- Seems that bees get much faster into the apiary, when its located near to plants and trees (i tested it with 20 apiarys)
- Built 15 new apiaries. Checked them after 4 hours: 1 of 15 had a queen. Checked them again after an additional 15 hours: 11 of 14 had a queen. 24 hours is probably sufficient to wait before checking for queens.
- Apiaries appear to only start generating wax and honey after they are first checked for wax and honey. That is, the first check always produces 0 regardless of how long you wait after finding a queen.
- I've been testing this for awhile and it seems having another apiary with a queen in it nearby(haven't tested how far yet) appears to speed the arrival of a queen for an empty apiary. the last experiment was an apiary approx. 70 coordinates away recieved a queen within 1 hour. (please check my results for verification)
- If you build apiaries very close to each other, they interfere. When I made 2*5 apiaries as close to each other as possible, the slowdown was not that large, but when I extended this to a total of around 80 apiaries, the honey/beeswax production all but halted. Very few new queens too.