Forestry-lineage bee breeding for modern NeoForge: 58 species and their mutation tree, with gene surgery included. New species and combs you can add with a single JSON file.
Find a wild hive, take the Princess and the Drones inside it, and put them in an Apiary. Every bee carries a genome - species, speed, lifespan, fertility, flowering, territory, temperature tolerance and a special effect - with a dominant and a recessive allele for each. What a queen produces, how fast she works, and whether she will work at all where you put her all follow from those genes.
Breeding
Cross two species and they may mutate into a third. There are 58 species across twenty branches, from the wild Forest and Meadows bees up to the Imperial, Demonic, Phantasmal, Diamond and Ecstatic lines at the top of each one, reached through a mutation tree gated on climate, biome, date and the parents you feed it.
Inheritance is Mendelian and visible: a bee's expressed allele is not the whole story, and the recessive one it is quietly carrying is what the next generation may surface. The Apiarist Database lists every species you have discovered, its products, and the pairs that lead to it.
Climate is a real constraint, not flavour. A Tropical line will not work in a tundra unless you shelter it, and the temperature where a hive actually stands - torches and all - is what counts.
Building a line deliberately
Frames go in the Apiary and change how it runs: more comb per cycle, four times the production rate, forced dominant or recessive inheritance, multiplied mutation rolls, a queen ended after a single cycle, shelter from the climate, work after dark, work through rain, or a hive that requeens itself from its own brood. They wear out as they work; an ender pearl on an anvil makes one permanent.
The Isolator extracts a single gene from a bee into a Serum, and the Infuser writes that Serum back into another bee - so a trait can be moved onto a line instead of being bred for and hoped for.
The Apiary stacks three high: three more frame slots and more output per level, and a faster hive at each one.
Products
Queens drop combs; the Centrifuge turns those into honey, wax, propolis, phosphor and the resource drops of the deeper branches. The Squeezer presses honey drops into liquid honey, the Tank holds it, and the Carpenter spends it building the frames - which is where every special frame is made, and where a worn one is repaired.
The Engine burns that same honey, or peat, into 40 FE a tick, and the Cable carries it to the machines. So an apiary can power itself, and no machine needs power to run: Forge Energy makes them eight times faster, and any tech mod that provides it works just as well.
Bees of your own
Drop a JSON file in config/mellifera/custom_bees/ and it becomes a real species: it appears in the Apiarist Database and in JEI, it can be bred for, and it is filed under a branch like any other. It can define its own combs, with their own colours and centrifuge outputs. Every drop chance in the mod is configurable too, in two generated .toml files that document their own defaults - and in multiplayer the server's tables win.
Requirements
Minecraft 26.2
NeoForge 26.2.0.56-beta or later
JEI - optional. With it installed, every comb, centrifuge recipe, frame recipe, engine fuel and mutation gets a page, and a bee can be dragged from JEI onto an Apiary to set that hive's breeding objective.
## Mellifera 0.4.0
> ⚠️ **Still early and still buggy.** This is a work-in-progress release: expect rough edges, unbalanced numbers and things that break. Do not use it on a world you care about, and please report anything you hit.
The release where the bees stop telling you everything. Three genes arrived that were only ever frames before, a bee no longer reads out its own genome the moment you pick it up, and a wild hive will not come apart for anything but the right tool. There is also the power and plumbing half: somewhere to keep what the Engine makes, a way to move liquid honey, and a bench that answers redstone.
### ⚠️ Two things will change a world you already have
- **A hive with no sky over stops working.** Cave dwelling is a gene now, and it is the only answer to being shut in - there is no frame for it. An apiary in a cellar or under a roof will sit idle until the queen's line carries the gene. Nothing in vanilla stops a beehive under a roof, so this is the mod asserting something new.
- **Wild hives now drop nothing unless you break them with a Scoop**, and they take thirty seconds to break with anything else. If you were relying on punching them, craft a Scoop first: sticks and string, and the recipe is in your book from the start.
### Three genes that used to be frames
A hive stops for the dark, for the rain, and - new in this release - for having no sky over it. Until now the first two had exactly one answer each, a Luminous or a Canopy frame, which meant the problem was solved *outside* the bee by something bought at the Carpenter that wears out. Forestry's whole middle game is solving it *inside* the bee, and that is what these are for.
- **Nocturnal**, **Tolerant flyer** and **Cave dwelling** join the genome, which is now eleven chromosomes rather than eight. A frame lifts a stop while it is installed and wearing out; a gene lifts it for good, in every hive that queen's line ever sits in. Neither is better - a frame moves between hives, a gene is bred once and then never thought about again.
- **All three are recessive**, so crossing one into a line buries it and getting it back out is the work. The Recessive frame finally has something worth pointing at.
- **Where to find them.** Tolerant flyer is on the Marshy, Tropical and Wintry roots, so it can be found in the world and bred inward from your first day. Nocturnal belongs to the Infernal, Vengeful and Monastic lines. Cave dwelling belongs to Monastic and to the whole ore tree, which is a long way in - an underground apiary is something you earn.
- The Isolator and the Infuser grew with the genome: both bottle and write all eleven, and their windows are now four cells across by three down.
### You have to identify a bee before you know what it is
A bee's tooltip used to print its whole genome, recessive alleles included, from the moment you picked it up. The one thing you would otherwise have to work out was simply handed to you, and the hidden half of the genome - the entire point of a breeding mod - was on show.
- **An unidentified bee names its species and nothing else.** That includes the recessive species allele, which is the most valuable line on the tooltip, and a queen's mate. Bees out of a wild hive and out of a queen's brood both arrive unread.
- **The species is never hidden**, which departs from Forestry deliberately: this mod paints every bee its species' colour, on the model, in your hand and lying on the floor. Refusing to name what you can see would be coy rather than mysterious.
- **The Beealyzer** reads them. It is a book in the machines' own leather with a brass inlay, and it reads every bee in your inventory in one press rather than making you feed them in one at a time. Good for 32 readings, then you write out another. It cannot be enchanted: filling up is the price, not an inconvenience to engineer around.
- It costs a honey drop to make, and a drop comes out of a Centrifuge, so your first few hives are worked blind. That is on purpose.
### The Scoop
- **A wild hive broken with anything else is a wild hive destroyed.** No bees, no combs, nothing.
- **And it takes thirty seconds**, which is the actual point. A block that shatters instantly and yields nothing teaches you that hives are worthless; one that will not come apart teaches you that you are holding the wrong thing. With the Scoop it comes apart in a single tick.
- Sixteen hives to a Scoop. Breaking anything else with it costs nothing.
### Advancements
Nineteen of them, where there used to be one. The root fires the moment you get your first bee out of a hive, and it branches four ways: the combs (Centrifuge, Royal Jelly, Squeezer, Carpenter, frames), the power (Engine, Capacitor, both pipes), the breeding, and the genetics bench. The two that matter are the breeding pair - one for a species neither parent was, one for a species at the top of its branch - because they are the only things in the tree you cannot simply craft your way to.
A data pack can add its own. Naming an item is vanilla's `minecraft:inventory_changed`; naming a *bee* is this mod's new `mellifera:bee` predicate, which takes a list of species, a `min_tier`, or nothing at all.
### Fluid Pipe
- **Moves liquid between machines.** The Squeezer makes honey, the Tank holds it, the Carpenter and the Engine spend it - and until now they were connected by standing the blocks face to face or by carrying buckets.
- **It holds nothing.** A hop is handed straight from the machine it draws out of to every tank the run reaches, in one transaction, so there is no charge in a wire to lose and no delay down its length.
- **Every joint has a direction, and you choose it.** A joint with a machine either draws out of it or feeds into it, and right-clicking that joint turns it round. It starts wherever the machine allows: the Squeezer draws, the Carpenter and Engine feed, and a Tank - which is both - starts as feeding and is the one you will most often turn. **Brass collars draw, steel collars feed**, so a run reads without clicking anything.
- **You can see what is in it.** The casing has a window, and what shows through it is the fluid's own texture - the same honey that is in the tank at the end of the run, ripples and all. A fluid from another mod looks like that mod drew it.
### Capacitor
- **Banks 200,000 FE.** An Engine stops burning when its own 20,000 buffer is full and a cable holds nothing, so a hive working overnight was making power nobody was asking for.
- Takes at both ends and hands power on to whatever is beside it, **except another Capacitor** - which is the one rule that stops a bank of them passing the same charge back and forth forever.
- No window: the charge is four lit cells on its own face, a comparator reading, and a number in the action bar when you click it.
### Redstone
- **Comparators read the machines.** What comes out is what that machine has made and not yet given away: combs in a hive's bay, the Centrifuge's output grid, the Isolator's rack of serums, honey in the Squeezer's tank, the frame waiting in the Carpenter, the power banked in the Engine or the Capacitor.
- **A redstone signal switches a machine off**, the way it does a hopper. Off means the simulation does not advance, not that anything is lost: a half-finished job keeps its progress, a lit Engine keeps what is in its firebox, and a queen in a switched-off hive stops working rather than starts dying. The Apiary window says when redstone is why it has stopped.
### Power, rebalanced
- **The Engine now puts out 80 FE a tick**, up from 40. A bucket of honey is 80,000 FE and a peat is 32,000.
- **A machine at full speed now draws 40**, down from 80. So one Engine keeps two machines running flat out, where before it could not keep up with one.
### Renamed
- **Cable is now Energy Pipe** and the new one is the **Fluid Pipe**, and the two sit together in the creative tab. They are one idea with two contents, and "Cable" and "Pipe" named the same object twice without saying which carried what. Block ids are unchanged, so nothing already placed moves.
### Also
- **Machine tanks now face a direction from outside.** The Squeezer's is an output, the Carpenter's and the Engine's are inputs that take honey and nothing else, and the Tank is storage. Before this a pipe laid against a Carpenter would have drained the honey it was about to spend, and anything at all could be pushed into the Squeezer.
- **Squeezer and Infuser joined the pickaxe tag**, which they had been left out of since they were added.
- **With JEI installed, clicking the drive track in the middle of a machine's window opens that machine's page.** It matters most on the ones whose recipes JEI could never have found by itself: the Carpenter's frames, its repair, and both genetics machines.
- **Recipe pages no longer run their text off the edge.** Every line is wrapped to the room it has, and the Isolator, Infuser, Carpenter and mutation pages were given more of it.
- A bee lying on the floor as an item is centred, turns on the spot instead of orbiting a point, and has its nose up rather than down.
- The Debug Stick reads a Fluid Pipe: its joints, what is flowing, and one live attempt at drawing, reported in the action bar.
### For pack makers
- `mellifera:bee` is a new data component predicate, usable anywhere an item predicate is: `{ "predicates": { "mellifera:bee": { "min_tier": 1 } } }`. It takes a `species` list, a `min_tier` (how deep into the mutation tree a species sits, so `1` reads as "came out of a cross"), or neither, which is "any bee" and covers all three castes.
- `mellifera:hives` is a new block tag. The Scoop is fast on anything in it, so a pack that adds a hive gets a working Scoop by being in the tag.
- Custom bees can set the three new genes in their `traits` block: `"nocturnal": "yes"`, `"tolerant_flyer": "yes"`, `"cave_dwelling": "yes"`.
## Mellifera 0.3.1
> ⚠️ **Still early and still buggy.** This is a work-in-progress release: expect rough edges, unbalanced numbers and things that break. Do not use it on a world you care about, and please report anything you hit.
A small one: it updates what the mod is built against and fixes a hole in the Cable added in 0.3.0.
### Updated
- **NeoForge 26.2.0.76**, up from 26.2.0.56-beta - which was the last beta build of the 26.2 line. Everything from .57 on ships without the suffix, so this is twenty builds and one step of stability later. `mellifera` now requires 26.2.0.76 or newer.
- **JEI 30.30.0.205**, up from 30.16.0.134.
### Fixes
- **The Cable's collar was hollow.** The brass rim where a cable clamps onto a machine is an eight-by-eight box standing proud of a six-by-six pipe, and it was missing the face at the back of it. The pipe covers the middle of that face but not the one-pixel rim, so from most angles you could see straight into the box. Both collars on the item in your hand had the same hole.
## Mellifera 0.3.0
> ⚠️ **Still early and still buggy.** This is a work-in-progress release: expect rough edges, unbalanced numbers and things that break. Do not use it on a world you care about, and please report anything you hit.
### Power of your own
- **New machine: Engine.** A generator that burns what the bees make: liquid honey out of its tank or peat out of the slot. 40 FE a tick, which is four machines' worth. A bucket of honey is 40 000 FE and a peat is 16 000. It burns one fuel at a time, honey first, and it will not burn into a full buffer - an idle engine spends nothing.
- **New block: Cable.** Copper and beeswax, six to a craft. It holds no power at all: a push into any part of a run is handed straight on to every machine that run reaches, so there is no charge in a wire to lose and no delay down its length. It connects to anything that takes Forge Energy, this mod's or another's, and wears a brass collar where it clamps onto a machine.
- Everything still runs unpowered at an eighth of the rate. The Engine makes the bench faster; it does not gate it.
### The honey now has three ends
- The Carpenter spends it on frames, the Engine burns it, and **one bucket of honey rafts into a Vanilla honey block** - the bucket comes back, so a Crafter can run it.
- **Honeydew presses in the Squeezer**, at 125 mB against a honey drop's 250: eight to a bucket. It was a centrifuge output nothing in the mod took back.
### The other leftovers found uses
- **Propolis** - four make a slime ball.
- **Ice shards** - four make ice.
- **Peat** - burns in a furnace for 1600 ticks, the same as a coal, as well as in the Engine.
### Balance
- **Frame repair is now a quarter of what the frame costs to build**, not a flat 200 mB. The flat rate said the right thing about a Luminous frame at 1000 and the wrong thing about a Terminator at 250, where repairing was a new frame with an ash saved.
### JEI
- A page for the **Engine**, listing both fuels with what each is worth in FE.
- The Squeezer page lists honeydew beside the honey drop.
### Fixes
- The seven frame recipe-unlock advancements were left pointing at recipes that moved to the Carpenter in 0.2.0. Removed, and the **Carpenter, Squeezer and Tank got the advancements they never had**.
- **Squeezer and Infuser were missing from the pickaxe tag** and could be broken by hand.
## Mellifera 0.2.0
> ⚠️ **Still early and still buggy.** This is a work-in-progress release: expect rough
> edges, unbalanced numbers and things that break. Do not use it on a world you care
> about, and please report anything you hit.
### Frames are now made in a machine
- **New machine: the Carpenter.** The seven special frames are no longer shapeless
crafts - they are worked out of a plain frame, an ingredient and **liquid honey**,
which finally gives the Squeezer's honey somewhere to go: combs → Centrifuge →
Squeezer → Tank → Carpenter.
- **The Carpenter repairs worn frames**, for a flat 200 mB of honey. A spent Insulation
frame is worth carrying home now.
- Frames still work without power; FE just makes the machine eight times faster, as
everywhere else in the mod.
### Two new frames for the things you could not control
- **Luminous Frame** - the hive keeps working after dark.
- **Canopy Frame** - the hive keeps working through rain.
Between these and the Insulation frame, all three hard stops (temperature, night,
weather) now have an answer, and each costs one of the three frame slots.
### JEI
- Pages for the **Carpenter** (every frame recipe, plus repairs), the **Isolator** and
the **Infuser**. The genetics machines had never had one, so serums were effectively
undocumented in game.
### Machine windows rebuilt
- All five machine windows are now generated from one source: a single inner panel with
the slots, drive track, output grids and tanks set into it, consistent across every
machine.
- The energy gauge is a stack of amber cells instead of a flat red bar, in the same
place as before.
### Fixes
- Hives no longer carpet their territory in grass and flowers. The flowering pass was
bone-mealing grass blocks, which spawn whole meadows per hit; it now only nudges
crops and saplings.
- Flowering also no longer runs while a hive is stopped - it is gated on the hive
actually working, like everything else.
## 0.1.0 - Alpha
First public release. Forestry-style bee breeding for NeoForge.
**Bees**
- 50+ species across 15+ branches, each with speed, lifespan, fertility,
territory, temperature tolerance, flowering and effect alleles
- Mendelian breeding with dominant/recessive inheritance and mutation
chances gated on biome, climate, date, nearby blocks or fluids
- Six wild hive types generating in matching biomes
**Blocks**
- Apiary with a frame system: productivity, accelerator, dominant,
recessive, mutagenic, terminator, automation and insulation
- Centrifuge, Isolator, Infuser and Squeezer
- Machines run without a power mod installed and 8x faster on Forge Energy,
so the mod is playable standalone
**Tools**
- Apiarist Database: browse every species, its traits and its mutation tree
- Beelocator: points at the nearest wild hive
- Climate Chart: shows the local temperature and its breakdown while held
**Other**
- Climate model driven by biome, altitude, weather, sky exposure,
geothermal depth and nearby heat sources
- JEI integration for mutations, centrifuge, squeezing and apiary production
- Custom bees and comb outputs definable in `config/mellifera/`
### Known limitations
Items marked `[WIP]` have no use yet: honeydew, refractory wax, propolis,
silky propolis, ash, ice shards, peat and liquid honey.