Bees! Vikings love bees, apparently. And all things considered, it’s really not that surprising. Getting your hands on bees is pretty much essential in Valheim. They produce honey, which is a key ingredient in Meads and Potions.
Bees live in Beehives, which are first found out in the wild and can later be crafted and organized to create your own Viking beehive farm. Living the life of a Viking isn’t all about swinging an axe and killing bosses, you’ve got to graft it out at your home base and make sure your bees are happy and producing.
6 Why Do You Need Beehives Anyway?
Beehives are where bees live, and bees produce honey. It takes about 20 real-life minutes for bees to produce a tasty globule of honey which means you probably want a few beehives going at once.
You can eat honey straight from the hive, like some sort of deranged bear, or use the honey to craft a range of useful meads to help your progression into Valheim’s trickier biomes. Although honey does provide some HP and stamina, you will need to stuff your face to get any sort of value out of it, so best to save it for meads.
5 Finding Your First Beehive
Beehives are found in the abandoned buildings that spawn randomly in the Meadows, Swamp, and Black Forest biomes. Not every abandoned building has a beehive inside, so you might have to hit a couple before you find one.
Don’t just charge right up to the bees and start smacking the beehive with your axe. Bees in Valheim are no joke. They deal poison damage and can quickly overwhelm an unsuspecting player. Out of all the deadly monsters in Valheim, it’s not a good look to die to bees. It’s a better idea to ping the beehive down with your bow and arrow.
4 Queen Bee And Yummy Honey
Upon destroying a beehive there’s a good chance you’ll get your first batch of honey and a smaller chance that a Queen Bee falls out. You’re basically after a Queen Bee as this means you can craft your own beehive. If you don’t want to keep running around looking for beehives, it’s best to set up your own bee farm as soon as possible.
If you do find a Queen Bee you can head home and craft your own beehive. Each one requires 10 wood and one Queen Bee, so try and get a couple of the Queens before you return from your honey-hunting expedition.
3 Setting Up A Bee Farm In Valheim
Pick a place near your base to set up your first beehive. You’ll likely have a few set up eventually, so make sure there’s enough room for a few beehives and some protection. Keep a good meter or so between each hive. Beehives are always a good addition to your Valheim farm.
Like Workbenches, beehives attract a lot of negative attention, especially from angry Greydwarves (that just hate everything, it seems) so you will need to build a fence around your bees. Don’t place the fence too close to the hives. The bees don’t like fences. You can monitor the bee’s happiness by checking out the beehives.
Keep in mind that beehives produce a blob of honey every 20 minutes and can only store up to 4 at a time. Keep checking back regularly to maximize the efficiency of your beehive farm.
2 You’ve Got Loads Of Honey, What Next?
Honey is a crucial crafting ingredient in a whole bunch of different meads. The ones that really stick out as useful are the Frost Resistance Mead, necessary for your first adventure into the Mountain biome and silver ore hunting, and the Poison Resistance mead, very useful in the stinky swamp biome.
You need 10 honey, 5 Thistle, 2 Bloodbags, and a Greydwarf eye for a single Frost Resistance Mead Base, which then produces 6 potions. Plus, meads can only be crafted via the Fermenter. So with all the requirements, the time spent waiting around for your bees to produce honey and the need for a Fermenter, getting your hands on meads is actually a pretty long process.
1 Using Honey As A Food Source
Even though honey is used to craft mead bases, the short-term benefits of honey can get players through tricky situations, especially if they want to speed through progression and jump into the Black Forest biome early.
Honey actually provides the highest health regen of any food item in the game, with 5 hp per tick. It only lasts for 300 seconds, though. This basically makes it one of the best fast healing items if it’s paired up with a Rested buff. You will need a lot of honey to survive the high damage of monsters in the Black Forest, but it’s still a strategy if you’re willing to take the risk.
NEXT: Valheim And 9 Other Unique Survival Games
