Key Takeaway
You can feed flowers to adult Bees to breed them in Minecraft.
Bees have a cooldown of 5 minutes after breeding before they can breed again.
Baby Bees take 20 minutes (one full in-game day) to grow into adult Bees.
Both in real life and in Minecraft, each Bee that flies from flower to flower pollinates the local flora. This helps your crops grow and results in Bees producing honey for you to harvest. More little bumbling buddies means more honey and pollination, so breeding them is a good move!
Table Of Contents
What You Need to Breed Bees in Minecraft
Like most animal mobs in Minecraft, you can feed a Bee their favorite food to get them to breed. Specifically, you must feed any type of flower to a pair of Bees to make them enter love mode. Since you must feed both adult Bees, you’ll need at least two flowers—which don’t have to be the same species.
After the pair of adult Bees interact, a Baby Bee appears a few seconds later. Following the birth of the Baby Bee, the parents have a five-minute cooldown before they can breed again.
It takes Baby Bees 20 minutes (one full in-game day) to fully mature into adults. This process can be sped up by feeding flowers to Baby Bees. Each flower fed to the young insect gets it 10% closer to becoming an adult.
NoteWhere to Find Flowers for Bee Breeding
Flowers in Minecraft can grow in almost any Overworld biome. Furthermore, flowers cannot grow in the Nether and The End. Since the number of Overworld biomes flowers do not grow in is shorter than the ones they do, we’ll list the former for your convenience.
Every Overworld Biome Where Flowers DON’T Grow
- Badlands
- Eroded Badlands
- Wooded Badlands
- Mushroom Fields
- Grove
- Snowy Slopes
- Frozen Peaks
- Jagged Peaks
- Stony Peaks
- Lush Caves
- Mangrove Swamp
TipThe Benefit of Breeding Bees
By setting up a Beehive near your farming plots, you can passively grow your crops a lot quicker!
Every morning, Bees leave their home to search for flowers. Once they spot their floral targets, Bees touch the flowers and collect pollen. If a Bee holding pollen flies one or two blocks over crops, there’s a 1% chance that they’ll pollinate your crops. In gameplay terms, this pollination advances the growth stage of your crops—identical to using Bone Meal. If you set up your Beehives and crops in an efficient manner, you can get worker Bees to vastly improve the growth speeds of your farm.
Types of Crops Bees Can Pollinate
- Wheat
- Potato
- Carrot
- Beetroot
- Melon
- Sweet Berries
- Pumpkin
- Cave Vines
- Torchflower
Ideal Beehive and Crop Setup
Although there are many ways to do so, all Beehive and crop setups follow the same concept. Basically, you want to have your crops between a bunch of Beehives and a field of flowers. That way, after the Bees pick up some pollen, they have to fly over your crops to get back to their Beehives.
Since Bees holding pollen can pollinate crops they fly over up to 10 times per day (each), every Bee has a 10% chance to increase the growth stage of one crop each day. Moreover, this means that if you have 10 Bees, there’s a 100% chance that at least one of your crops will have its growth stage advanced on a daily basis. This stacks with natural growth rates, plus, you don’t have to do anything! This automated process is an effortless and organic way to increase crop yields.
The worker Bee is a farmer’s best friend in Minecraft. As such, the more, the merrier! Just be kind to your Bees, as you won’t like them when they’re angry. Not only can their stings hurt, but they also poison you for a short while. Thankfully, the Honey that Bees create removes the Poison debuff. Keep that in mind in case you ever accidentally boop a Bee while fighting hostile mobs.
