How to Get Honey from a Beehive in Minecraft

Bees are neutral mobs introduced in the Minecraft 1.15 update. They are black and yellow flying creatures that attack if you attack first, as well as if you try and disturb their beehive without any proper measures. Just like in the real world, bees produce honey. You can either use shears on the beehive or nest to get honeycomb or an empty glass bottle to get honey in Minecraft.

In this guide, we will be focusing on how you can get honey from beehives in Minecraft. However, if you are interested in mass-producing bee products, check out our guide on how to make a bee farm, which includes two farms in one.

Resources You Need to Make Honey

Resources you’re going to need to get honey in Minecraft are an empty glass bottle, a full beehive or bee nest, and a campfire.

• Glass Bottle

Glass bottles are craftable using only three glass blocks. Follow the recipe from the screenshot below on your crafting table to make bottles. You can get glass blocks by smelting sand blocks in a furnace, or by buying them from librarian villagers.

• Beehive

When it comes to the bee nest, you’ll naturally come across this block while exploring your world. It is generated in various Minecraft biomes and can even be collected with a tool enhanced with a silk touch enchantment. Though, you’ll need to wait for it to fill up completely. Bees will exit the bee nest in order to look for flowers. Once they’re done pollinating, they’ll enter the bee nest and “work” inside.

Each time a bee leaves a bee nest, the honey level of that block increases by one. You can monitor this value by looking at the targeted block section of the F3 debug screen in Java edition.

Once the honey level reaches 5, the bee nest will start dripping honey indicating that it’s full, so the honey is ready to be harvested. Alternatively, you can also make a beehive block that works basically the same as a bee nest but is easily accessible through crafting.

• Campfire

Campfires are essential since their smoke calms the bees down, ensuring they don’t go agro on you. This is quite important because not only do bees inflict poison after a sting, but also die soon after. So, if you’re looking to preserve the bee population you have, we suggest making a campfire first.

How to Make Honey in Minecraft

So, after you have crafted glass bottles and found a full bee nest or beehive, it’s time to get that sweet sweet honey. Follow the step-by-step process below to do that.

1. After you locate a bee nest, place a campfire underneath it, so the smoke rises to it.

2. Then, put the glass bottle on your inventory’s hotbar and select it.
3. Next, walk up to a full bee nest and right-click it with the bottle.
4. The glass bottle will instantly fill up with honey.

5. You can then wait for the bees to exit the bee nest five times, so you can fill it up again.

To make the process a bit faster, you can enclose the bee nest and place a flower accessible to the bees. This will encourage them to choose only that flower, so they travel less far, therefore, wasting less time. Also, make sure you block access to the campfire itself, so bees don’t die accidentally.

The alternate way to get honey bottles is by using 4 empty bottles and a honey block. Placing them in the crafting table will yield 4 honey bottles. This is a shapeless recipe, so feel free to place these items as you wish.

This can be useful in a custom map or a mini-game in which you’re competing with other players in certain challenges.

Ways to Use Honey in Minecraft

Honey, or technically, honey bottles only have a few uses in the game, so let’s go over them right here.

1. Drinking Item

You can drink honey from the honey bottle, just like you eat any other food item in the game. Select it on your hotbar and hold the right-click button. The drinking animation will start playing on your screen.

After you empty a honey bottle, you will get 3 hunger points and 1.2 saturation back. Also, drinking honey will remove a poison effect if you have it applied, so you can use it even with a full hunger bar. However, it doesn’t affect any other status effects players might have at the moment.

2. Crafting Ingredient

With a single honey bottle, you can make 3 pieces of sugar. Place the honey bottle in one slot of the crafting grid in your inventory and the crafting table to get sugar on the right.

Apart from sugar, you can also craft a honey block using four honey bottles. You may also do this in the player’s inventory or the crafting table. Honey blocks are often used in redstone contraptions as redstone components, with similar functions to slime blocks.

However, these two blocks do not stick to each other, allowing you to make bigger flying machines. They also slow down any player or mob and stop them from jumping high. Furthermore, the honey block is a part of the “Sticky Situation” advancement in Minecraft, which is obtainable if you collide with this block while falling, as it’ll break your fall. Follow the recipe above to craft a honey block.

So, now you know how to get honey in Minecraft. Was the information in this guide helpful? Let us know in the comments below!