Bee in Minecraft: Nests, Honey and How Not to Get Stung

Bees are neutral flying mobs that live in bee nests, collect nectar from flowers and fill their nest with honey. They’re harmless until you hit one, break their home, or take honey without a campfire underneath, at which point every bee nearby comes after you.

Stat	Value
Health	10 (5 hearts)
Sting	2 damage (3 on Hard) plus Poison: 10 s on Normal, 18 s on Hard
Behavior	Neutral
Spawns	In naturally generated bee nests, 2-3 per nest
Drops	1-3 XP; nothing else

Where the nests are

Bee nests hang off the side of oak, birch, mangrove and cherry trees. Meadows are the best place to look, because every tree that can carry a nest there has one. In plains, sunflower plains, cherry groves and mangrove swamps the chance is around 5% per tree, and in flower forests and ordinary forests it’s lower still.

You can also grow your own. An oak, birch or cherry sapling planted within two blocks of a flower has a 5% chance of growing with a populated nest.

A bee’s day

Bees leave the nest in daylight, hover over flowers for about 20 seconds to collect nectar, then fly home. A bee carrying nectar has visible yellow specks and pollinates crops it flies over, pushing wheat, carrots, potatoes, berries and similar crops up a growth stage. A few hives next to your farm speed it up noticeably.

Each bee returning with nectar raises the nest’s honey level by one. At level 5 you can collect honey bottles or honeycomb. Our honey guide walks through both.

Bees go home at night and in rain. In the Nether and the End there’s no day cycle or weather, so they work nonstop.

What makes them angry

All nearby bees turn hostile when:

• you hit a bee (unless you kill it in one hit),
• you take honey or honeycomb without a campfire below the nest,
• you break the nest or hive.

Angry bees have red eyes and chase you for 20 to 39 seconds. Each one stings once, poisons you, then loses its stinger and dies about a minute later. A shield block doesn’t count as a hit, so a blocked bee keeps trying.

Moving a nest

Break the nest at night, when every bee is inside, with a Silk Touch tool. The bees stay inside the item and come out happily when you place it at your base. Without Silk Touch the nest drops nothing and the bees spill out angry.

Breeding

Feed two bees a flower and you get a baby bee plus 1-7 XP. Wither roses poison them with Wither, and open eyeblossoms poison them, so stick to normal flowers. Growth and breeding timers pause while a bee is inside its hive. Bees are also the only arthropod that can spawn on Peaceful, where they never attack at all.