Productive Bees: Breeding Bees for Resources
Productive Bees greatly expands Minecraft's bees, adding many species that produce resources and mod materials. This guide covers how to start beekeeping.
Many new bees
Productive Bees adds a large range of bee species, each tied to a resource — bees that produce ingots, gems, and materials from vanilla and other mods. Collecting and breeding these species is the core of the mod, turning bees into a renewable source of resources.
Hives and processing
You house bees in the mod's advanced hives and boxes, then process their output: a 
Centrifuge extracts honey and the bees' special produce from combs. Better hives hold more and work faster, so upgrading your apiary increases production.
Breeding and upgrades
New species are obtained through breeding — combining bees to produce rarer offspring — and the mod adds upgrades and items to improve bee productivity and manage your colonies. Start by catching a few wild bees, build hives and a centrifuge, then breed toward the resource-producing species you need. Productive Bees rewards patient automation, turning a small apiary into a steady resource farm.
Breeding is the mod, and the pairs are fixed
Most of the bees you want come from crossing two you already have. The chain is deliberate — early bees combine into metal bees, which combine into the valuable ones:
- Iron — Crystalline crossed with Ashy Mining
- Gold — Crystalline crossed with Mason
- Redstone — Glowing crossed with Chocolate Mining
- Lapis — Redstone crossed with Blue Banded
- Blazing — Magmatic crossed with Nomad
Coal — Blazing crossed with Leafcutter
Obsidian — Magmatic crossed with Sweat
Emerald — Slimy crossed with Diamond- Experience — Emerald crossed with Lapis
Read that list backwards and it plans your whole run: an Experience bee needs an Emerald bee, which needs a Diamond bee, which is several crosses deep.
Some bees are made, not bred
A few arrive by other routes. Feeding a block of TNT to an ordinary bee produces a CreeBee, and feeding a block of netherite to a Diamond bee produces an Ancient one. Skeletal bees and ZomBees move in on their own if an advanced hive is left empty in the dark. Hand a Skeletal one a wither rose and it turns Withered.
The numbers behind it
Bee Conversion carries 131 recipes on 1.21.1 (114 on 1.20.1) and Bee Spawning 35 on both. The processing side is where the versions diverge sharply: the 1.20.1 build registers 387 advanced-hive recipes and 400 centrifuge recipes, against 61 and 5 on 1.21.1.
It plugs into everything
The recipe list includes categories belonging to other mods — casting tables and basins, an atomic forge, a blood infuser, altars, an awakening and a binding step. Productive Bees produces material for whatever tech mod is in the pack rather than only for itself.
Scale
344 pages across 296 blocks and 48 items, on 13.13.0 (1.21.1) and 12.6.0 (1.20.1).