Changes for beehive

[Limon Sock]

I've just been reading a bit about how people are saying honey is overpowered and that. People have had their own suggestions for nerfing honey/it's products and that, so I'm not going into them here. I thought there could be a change to the actual beebox that may (or may not lol) help.

There could be two 'levels' to the bee box building tree (similar to farms). The first and basic level could be a skep. These are the old-fashioned wicker baskets that people used to use as a beehive (These are a few example pictures, here, here and here). Skeps were constructed from wicker (e.g. reeds or grass) and unfortunately, were difficult to extract honey from without entirely destroying the hive.

The second level could be one of the new bee boxes (like these). The advantage these have is that they are reusable and honey can be extracted without destroying them.

The second level is actually in the game already, the bee boxes .

The first level is sort of already in the game, the bee hives. These need to be destroyed to get any honey out of them.

Main point:

What I'm suggesting is that we should be able to build something like the bee hives we find generated in the world already. It should be 'fairly' cheap to make: four bees, honeycomb and something to contain everything, such as a couple reeds, grass and/or rope. The only way to extract the honey would be to break it, whereupon it gives out honey and honeycomb like a normal hive. Honey production would work the same as with the boxes (as in relating to how many flowers are about) and the amount of honey inside could be indicated somehow, but I'd say you shouldn't be able to tell with these.

The bee boxes could act in much the same way as now, but have a higher cost: same number of bees, but more wooden boards (4 maybe, or 8?) and two honeycombs. Honey production would remain the same, but after collecting honey there could be a delay (a day or more) before honey production starts again.

Misc ideas

Obviously this will probably need tweaking to get it working, if implemented, but if bee boxes are still over powered there have been some suggestions people have made (like hives spawning killer bees, queen bees, bears eating honey etc).

One idea I had is that every so often (every ten-fifteen days) it could go into breeding season. The bees would leave the hive (potentially spawning drones or a queen bee or something) and honey production would be stopped. The hive would need to be restarted with new bees (or maybe a queen bee or queen bee egg if queen bees are implemented [and they drop queen bee eggs lol]).

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but a smoker could be implemented, which uses grass or twigs, to placate the bees. Harvesting without this could spawn killer bees.

Bee boxes could periodically get infested be varroa mites (or something) and need to be cleaned (probably not as good an idea, because we'd need some way of making a poison to kill the ites or something lol).

If bears (or honeybadgers, or something else which may decide to munch on the honey) are implemented, boxes may become 'damaged' after they are attacked and need to be repaired. Shouldn't destroy the box entirely, but could be repaired with extra boards or something.