Overview
A beehive is the crafted equivalent of a bee nest and behaves almost identically: it houses up to 3 bees, fills through 5 honey levels as they pollinate, and yields 3 honeycomb to shears or 1 honey bottle to a glass bottle at full. The differences are practical rather than mechanical. A beehive can be crafted, so once you have a nest you never need to find another one — six planks and three honeycomb make a hive, and the bees you already have will populate it. It can be placed anywhere, in any orientation, which means an apiary can be designed rather than discovered. And it does not require Silk Touch to relocate, because you can simply craft another. The bee mechanics are the same: a campfire up to 5 blocks below calms them, harvesting without one makes every bee inside hostile, and a hive with flowers within range fills far faster. Comparators read the honey level, which is how automatic honey farms know when to dispense a bottle or trigger the shears. It also breaks and drops itself with any tool, so an apiary can be rearranged freely.
Housing bees anywhere you want them, producing honeycomb for waxing copper and crafting candles, honey bottles for food, and a comparator-readable output for automatic honey farms.
Minecraft classifies Beehive as a functional block. A crafting table turns its ingredients into Beehive. It breaks almost instantly, with a hardness of just 0.6.
You can break it by hand without losing the drop. It drops as the same block you mined. With a blast resistance of only 0.6 it will not survive an explosion.
Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot. The recipe calls for Oak Planks and Honeycomb. It is not used in any crafting recipe.
How to get it
Craft it from 6 wooden planks and 3 honeycomb. The honeycomb comes from shearing a full bee nest or hive, so the first hive always depends on finding a natural nest first.
Tips
- A comparator reads the honey level 0 to 5, which is what an automatic honey farm triggers on.
- Keep flowers within range of the hive: bees fill it far faster when they have somewhere to pollinate.
- A campfire up to 5 blocks below with smoke reaching the hive lets you harvest without angering anything.
- Honeycomb waxes copper to freeze its oxidation stage, which is the other reason to keep a hive running.
How long it takes to break
Beehive has a hardness of 0.6. By hand that is 0.9 seconds per block; with the correct tool at netherite tier it is 0.1 seconds.
No particular tool tier is required: any tool, or none at all, still yields the drop, so the table below is about speed rather than about whether you get anything.
Efficiency contributes its level squared plus one to tool speed, which makes Efficiency V roughly 2 times faster than the plain tool.
| Tool | No enchantment | Efficiency III | Efficiency V |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hand | 0.9 s | 0.9 s | 0.9 s |
| Wooden | 0.45 s | 0.1 s | instant |
| Stone | 0.25 s | 0.1 s | instant |
| Iron | 0.15 s | 0.1 s | instant |
| Diamond | 0.15 s | instant | instant |
| Netherite | 0.1 s | instant | instant |
| Golden | 0.1 s | instant | instant |
Properties
Blast resistance on Beehive is 0.6, so any explosion nearby takes it out. It stops light entirely and gives off no light. A single slot takes 64, the usual full stack. The block is tagged for axes, and only that class gets the speed bonus; everything else mines at bare-hand rate.
- Transparent
- No
- Required tool
- Any
Crafting recipe
Crafting Table
Beehive
Drops
Mined with any, Beehive drops itself.
Guides and tools that cover this
Frequently asked questions
How do you get Beehive in Minecraft?
Beehive is crafted from Oak Planks and Honeycomb.
What tool do you need to break Beehive?
No specific tool is required — Beehive can be broken by hand.
Is Beehive blast resistant?
Beehive has a blast resistance of 0.6, so an explosion nearby will destroy it.
How many Beehive fit in one stack?
A stack is 64, and a double chest of them comes to 3,456.
How long does Beehive take to break?
With the correct tool at netherite tier it takes 0.1 seconds; by hand it takes 0.9 seconds.
