Save the bees! Or at least learn how to care for your newest virtual pet – the bee box! This new pet can be quite fruitful, as good love and care can produce honey for profit, or some other cool effects you might not have thought of. Read on for an in depth look at how to care for your new, slightly irritable housemates.
Getting Started
Purchase your new pet via Buy Mode, searching for Bertie’s Bee Box. Pick your favourite colour and place your bee box wherever you’d like. They do work indoors, however for realisms sake you probably wouldn’t want to keep the bees inside (it’s up to you though, they function the exact same!). I would highly recommend keeping your bees outdoors in a well decorated space, near planter boxes if your sim has a little garden!
When you first start looking after your bees, you’ll wanna pay attention to what season it is in game. Bees are mostly active during summer, slightly less active in spring and fall, and completely dormant in winter; meaning they produce honey the quickest in summer and not at all in winter (with spring and fall in between). You can care for dormant bees but they will not produce honey. Bees will be dormant regardless of being indoors or outdoors, unlike plants.
Proper Bee Care
Time to start caring for our new bee friends! They function a lot like the small pets in My First Pet Stuff, and your sim will need to interact with the bee box in order to care for your bees. The main interactions when starting your new bee army is:
- Bonding
- Treating mites
- Collecting honey
When you start interacting with the bees, they will probably sting you. This is to be expected, if you don’t wear your beekeeping suit. The beekeeping suit will prevent your sim from bonding with your bees, preventing friendship growth. These bees are social, and need your sim to bond with them regularly to keep them calm.
Stings produce a +2 Uncomfortable moodlet for 2 hours, however this moodlet does not stack. If you can keep your sim otherwise happy (which is why making sure to have a nicely decorated space is beneficial, to help offset the Uncomfortable moodlet) you can keep interacting with the bees without fear of them repeatedly stinging the sim. This will build your bond with your bees, and prevent them from dropping to a poor mood and getting angry, as well as producing good quality honey.
An inevitable mood dropper however is the box being infested with mites. Your bees will not like this, and the longer the bees are infested the angrier they will become, making stings more and more likely. Leave them long enough, and you will see your bee bond drop as well. The best way to treat the mites is to switch to the beekeeping suit, and treating the mites with a §15 Mite Treatment (available directly from the bee box pie menu).
The Benefits of Bees
While not as drastic as in real life, bees do produce some really cool kickbacks to befriending them and keeping them happy. By placing your happy bees near growing plants, they will ‘pollinate’ them, producing a slight bonus that affects growth and evolution times for your harvestable plants. The range on this is quite large, but mind that it’s the same range that sims can be stung by mad bees.
Bee Swarms
Perhaps the coolest aspect to bees is the bee swarm. Once you raise your bond enough, you can collect bee swarms every few hours from your bee boxes, and they have a bunch of cool things the can do. You can also collect these swarms in winter, so even when your bees aren’t producing honey they still are pretty useful.
Collect your swarm from the box, and you’ll find them located in your sim’s inventory. There’s six different options for you to choose from, but once you’ve chosen it uses the swarm and they can’t be reused. You can choose from:
- Attack… (choose sim, must be nearby)
- Woo.. (choose sim, must be nearby)
- Cheer self up
- Fetch gift
- Cheer up.. (choose sim, must be nearby)
- Pollinate nearby plants
Choosing to cheer yourself up grants a confident +1 moodlet for 4 hours, and is a fun way to put your sim in a good mood. But the neatest swarm option is fetch gift – this will send the bees off, and they come back with a beautifully wrapped gift of a random collectible. My sim got herself Xenopetrium from the elements collection (Who needs Sixam when you have bees?), Flamingonium, and a Lunar Lakes postcard, all from her friendly bees.
If you don’t use these swarms, the bees will eventually fly back home, disappearing from your sim’s inventory.
Sweet, Sweet Honey
Your bees have worked hard, and now you’re ready to reap the rewards. While in the excitement of seeing “Collect Honey” no longer greyed out, you might just sell your honey. If you choose to sell, hopefully you’ve been looking after your bees, making bonds and keeping them mite-free – the higher your bond, the higher quality your honey will be, with your max sell price per jar at §60. A full bee box produces 4 jars, and at your max sell price you can make §240. A pretty penny for a box full of honey!
However choosing to just collect your honey, there’s another cool feature you can use. Consuming the honey gives you a neat little happy moodlet of +1 for 4 hours. But it’s not just any happy moodlet – it removes all negative moodlets from weather effects on your sim, and makes them temporarily invincible to extreme weather. Honey can also be used for a new recipe, the honey cake, or for a new tea that produces a focused moodlet. Must be some strong honey!
Have you started raising bees and producing honey? Do you like selling your honey, hoarding your honey, or just collecting swarms of bees to attack your enemies? Let me know!
The lot featured in this post can be found here – it’s a beautiful, Seasons-ready flower shop, perfect for bees!
