Mellifera

Find a wild hive, take the Princess and the Drones inside it, and put them in an Apiary. Every bee carries a genome - species, speed, lifespan, fertility, flowering, territory, temperature tolerance and a special effect - with a dominant and a recessive allele for each. What a queen produces, how fast she works, and whether she will work at all where you put her all follow from those genes.

Breeding

Cross two species and they may mutate into a third. There are 58 species across twenty branches, from the wild Forest and Meadows bees up to the Imperial, Demonic, Phantasmal, Diamond and Ecstatic lines at the top of each one, reached through a mutation tree gated on climate, biome, date and the parents you feed it.

Inheritance is Mendelian and visible: a bee's expressed allele is not the whole story, and the recessive one it is quietly carrying is what the next generation may surface. The Apiarist Database lists every species you have discovered, its products, and the pairs that lead to it.

Climate is a real constraint, not flavour. A Tropical line will not work in a tundra unless you shelter it, and the temperature where a hive actually stands - torches and all - is what counts.

Building a line deliberately

• Frames go in the Apiary and change how it runs: more comb per cycle, four times the production rate, forced dominant or recessive inheritance, multiplied mutation rolls, a queen ended after a single cycle, shelter from the climate, work after dark, work through rain, or a hive that requeens itself from its own brood. They wear out as they work; an ender pearl on an anvil makes one permanent.
• The Isolator extracts a single gene from a bee into a Serum, and the Infuser writes that Serum back into another bee - so a trait can be moved onto a line instead of being bred for and hoped for.
• The Apiary stacks three high: three more frame slots and more output per level, and a faster hive at each one.

Products

Queens drop combs; the Centrifuge turns those into honey, wax, propolis, phosphor and the resource drops of the deeper branches. The Squeezer presses honey drops into liquid honey, the Tank holds it, and the Carpenter spends it building the frames - which is where every special frame is made, and where a worn one is repaired.

The Engine burns that same honey, or peat, into 40 FE a tick, and the Cable carries it to the machines. So an apiary can power itself, and no machine needs power to run: Forge Energy makes them eight times faster, and any tech mod that provides it works just as well.

Bees of your own

Drop a JSON file in config/mellifera/custom_bees/ and it becomes a real species: it appears in the Apiarist Database and in JEI, it can be bred for, and it is filed under a branch like any other. It can define its own combs, with their own colours and centrifuge outputs. Every drop chance in the mod is configurable too, in two generated .toml files that document their own defaults - and in multiplayer the server's tables win.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.2
• NeoForge 26.2.0.56-beta or later
• JEI - optional. With it installed, every comb, centrifuge recipe, frame recipe, engine fuel and mutation gets a page, and a bee can be dragged from JEI onto an Apiary to set that hive's breeding objective.

Credits and licence

LGPL v3. The species data, the mutation tree and a number of textures are derived from ForestryMC (© SirSengir and contributors) and from Binnie's Extra Bees (© Binnie and contributors), both LGPL v3. The bees themselves are Mojang's own model and texture, recoloured per species on your own client - no art is redistributed. Full attribution is in the repository's README.