How to make a beehive in Minecraft

Jessica Filby
An image of bees in Minecraft.

Beehives are essential if you want to collect honey in Minecraft. Here’s exactly how you can make one, and harvest all the honey you need in the beloved sandbox game.

Bees in Minecraft are an adorable mob but they’re also extremely useful. You collect honey from them and make Beehives, which speed up your crop growth and give you more ingredients for food. It’s a bit of a tricky process, however, so we’ve got all the information you need below.

How to craft a Beehive recipe: Step-by-step guide

  1. Make sure you’ve got Wood Planks and Honeycomb for crafting.
  2. Make your way to your crafting table or open the crafting grid.
  3. Once the crafting grid is on screen, place three wood planks on the top three and bottom slots.
  4. Then, place three honeycombs into the three middle slots.

Crafting Wood Planks

A custom image of Wood Planks in Minecraft.
Wood Planks are simple to craft.

Wood Planks can be obtained by placing a single block of Wood on a crafting table.

This will result in four Wood Planks being added to your inventory. Wood is an extremely common resource that can be easily found in any biomes with trees. 

Preparing to harvest Honeycomb

A custom image of Honeycomb in Minecraft.
Honeycomb is crucial for making Beehives in Minecraft.

Honeycomb is a bit more complicated to get in Minecraft. You’ll need to use Shears on a Bee Nest to get the job done.

To get Shears, place two Iron Ingots on the crafting grid. One must go in the middle slot, and the other in the bottom-left. Iron Ignots can be obtained in a variety of ways:

  • Smelting Iron Ore in any furnace.
  • Armorers, Toolsmiths, and Weaponsmiths typically stock Iron Ignots that you can trade for.
  • Zombies, Zombie Villages, and Iron Golems all have a chance to drop Iron Ignots upon being defeated.

Finding Bee Nests

A screenshot of a bee in Minecraft.
Bees will attack if you harvest from beehives so be careful!

Once you’ve got Shears, bees can be typically spotted in oak and birch trees, flower forests, and also by sunflower plains. Nests will spawn randomly throughout the world, and if you can spot bees in any of these locations, there’s likely a Nest close by.

When you’ve found one, approach it, use the Shears and you’ll get three units of Honeycomb.

It’s important to keep in mind that you will be attacked when you harvest, and the bees won’t give up until they’ve stung and poisoned you.

Thankfully, you can easily cure poison by drinking honey, milk, or an antidote, so we’d advise having at least one of these on hand before harvesting.

Crafting a Beehive

Now you’ve got all the materials you need, you can craft your Beehive by laying them out on the crafting table in the correct order, as shown in the image below:

A screenshot of the crafting grid for a Beehive in Minecraft.
You can use any wood planks to craft a Beehive in Minecraft.

How to collect Honey

Finally, if you’d prefer to just collect a quick pot of Honey, rather than make an entire Beehive in Minecraft, you can do so by following the steps below:

  1. Make sure you’ve got at least three Glass blocks on hand. These can be obtained by smelting Sand in a furnace.
  2. Enter the crafting grid, and place one block on the top right, one in the top left, and the last block in the center middle slot.
  3. Once you’ve done this, you’ll receive a Glass Bottle.
  4. Locate a Bee Nest, and interact with it to collect a single bottle of Honey.
  5. Make sure you’re stocked up on milk, or antidotes beforehand (assuming you don’t have any spare honey) so you can cure yourself after getting stung.

That’s everything you need to know about making a Beehive and collecting honey in Minecraft. For more on the game, check out the best Bedrock Shaders, house ideashow to make a Crafter blockhow to fix eroded badlands error, and all armor trims & recipes