Bay 12 Games Forum

Thanks for the comments sockless. You are correct that in real life a beehive needs a protein source like pollen to survive long term. That's why you sometimes see bees with orange or yellow pollen packed onto their hind legs. The pollen is fed to the baby bees to help them develop (adults usually just eat honey).

I thought showing players that bees could be kept indoors and fed sugar-syrup outweighed the added accuracy and complexity of having bees need to feed pollen to their brood. In RL, most beekeepers who cellar their bees for the winter only give them syrup anyway (and let the brood production wind down until the bees are realeased in spring). A beekeeper who wanted to maintain the brood rearing activity of an indoor (or outdoor) beehive could feed their bees a mixture of flour and brewer's yeast as a pollen substitute. Supporting a hive that didn't have access to outside flora (indoors/barren areas/drought) would be more challenging for a player, but the reward would be a supply of honey, wax, and stinging bees.


     Flaede: "Pathing, devourer of FPS, destroyer of worlds."

Beelines: When a hive finds a resource worth collecting (water, patch of flowers, bucket of syrup, etc.), they create a flyway to that resource. Forager bees stick closely to these flyway paths which the scouts convey in their waggle-dances. This lets people with good eyesight and patience follow wild bees back to their hives (a practice known as lining the bees).

Thanks Met, I forgot that "sticky trap" can also mean a trap that's literally sticky. I was thinking more like honey pitfalls or floodable rooms when I wrote that.

But I think a tacky honeyed floor or a floor with an inch or two of honey would be very difficult to run on; slowing enemies down and maybe claiming a few shoes along the way.

Besides bears, beehives can also attract web-spiders and bats.

Some Evil Ideas:
     +Some human-toxic honey can induce raging madness.
          edit: May actually be more of a stupor with hallucinations.
     +Some bee-toxic plants can kill bees.

     Bees aren't wasps, but:
     +some wasps are necrophagic.
     +There's a wasp that can transform a roach into a living puppet with a sting to the brain.

     +Some bees might like to build hives in skulls or carcasses.
          +“Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet.”
          EDIT: The Middle-Eastern connection between bees and lions is based on the mistaken belief that
          maggots, like those found in lion carcasses, were baby bees (instead of baby flies).

BTW, don't try to escape by jumping into water, bees don't give up that easily. Just run to shelter.

     ikkonoishi: "Evil bees don't use hives. They use dwarves."

What would the status of these dwarves be?
Would they become undead... ZOM-BEES!? (I'm so clever)
or would they be, you know... dead?

I know it wasn't your suggestion. Thanks for translating [WEBBER:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:HONEY] into something I could understand better.

What about bees attacking horses/unicorns/pegasus?

     Granite26: "I think honey is a bit esoteric."

Yeah... I'm biased.

     Neonivek: "Currently it wouldn't matter as only water is a true liquid so to speak."

What do you mean?