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Beekeeping

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Besides raising standard livestock and chickens, you can raise honey bees on your farm. You can't buy honey bees from Neil and you need to build their little bee houses. Raising bees will be necessary if you want to complete Dunhill's Town Renovation Plan #2.

You will need to collect wild honey bees. There are four types of honey bees you can collect. Higher level honey bees will produce higher level products:

Bees that you don't use can be placed in your storage box. The honey bees don't decay and can be kept until you need to use them next year.

The next thing you need is a Beehive. You can build these objects once you start Town Renovation Plan #2 and you pay 500 G to Rebecca for the blueprint. Each Beehive costs 8 Small Lumber and 5 Honeycomb. The Small Lumber isn't an issue but Honeycomb is a wild item from the River, Mountain, and Forest areas, and can't be found during Summer season. If you wanted to build Beehives in Summer, you'll either need to hoard the Honeycomb from Spring or you're stuck waiting until Fall.

To start your beekeeping adventure, place a Beehive on your farm and then put one bee into it. Once the bee has been placed into the hive it cannot be retrieved. Bees will live from Spring season until Winter 1. When Winter arrives the bees will die and you will have to place new bees into the Beehives when Spring arrives.

Bees Make Honey? No Way!

Bees will produce every 6 days if it is sunny. If you have a rainy day then the bees will be dormant and it will add a day to the production time. All of the bees produce at the same rate; an Eastern Honey Bee doesn't make honey any faster than a Mountain Honey Bee. The Beehive will sparkle when there is an item you can pick from it.

Item NameBee Production PercentageProfit
(1 Star to 5 Stars)
HoneyHoney Bee - 90%
Western Honey Bee - 10%
Eastern Honey Bee - 90%
312 G | 416 G | 520 G | 624 G | 728 G
Flower HoneyHoney Bee - 10%
Western Honey Bee - 90%
Mountain Honey Bee - 10%
468 G | 624 G | 780 G | 936 G | 1092 G
Royal JellyEastern Honey Bee - 10%
Mountain Honey Bee - 90%
1800 G | 2400 G | 3000 G | 3600 G | 4200 G

Each freshly seeded Beehive will produce an item at .5 Stars. To increase the Star Rank of the honey, you need to use perfume. You can make perfume using the Miller machine inside of your Maker Shed. You can't buy the plans for the Miller until you have crafted the Maker Shed, and harvested at least 30 flowers and/or herbs on your farm (not wild). The Maker Shed plan isn't for sale at Rebecca's shop until Fall 1 of your first year.

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It doesn't matter what type of perfume you use on your Beehives; the Star Rank of the perfume is what influences the Star Rank of the resulting honey. The more stars the perfume has, the faster the Star Rank of the Beehive increases. Each half-star on the honey is 30 Star Points and the 5th star appears when you have 271 SP.

So if you place 5 Star perfume on your Beehive, you'll gain 1 Star on the resulting honey every 3 days (1 full star is 60 SP, 60 SP / 20 SP from perfume per day = 3 days).

Raising the Stars of your honey quickly is necessary if you want to participate in the Honey Festival on Spring 22. This festival is unlocked after you ship any type of honey. If you really want to win the Advance festival class, you can work on increasing the Beehive's Star Rank over multiple seasons and then simply store your festival entry in your refrigerator until the festival in Spring. The honey won't lose its Star Rank no matter how long you keep it in storage.

Increasing Beehive Production

Normally a Beehive will produce 1 honey every 6 days, but you can increase the production of the hive by placing other hives next to it. When the corner of four active Beehives connect, the Beehives will double their production value.


There are only 2 Beehives next to each other. Each will produce 1 honey.


Now there are 4 Beehives, but only 3 of them have bees. Only 1 honey per hive.


4 Beehives are touching corners, triggering a combo that results in 2 honey per hive.

You can increase the production value to 3 honey per Beehive if you make 10 corner link-ups or more. This would require at least 18 Beehives and a lot of space to place them all.

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