How to Get Honey in Minecraft

1. Glass Bottles
2. Campfire
3. Beehive/Bee Nest

In order to collect the honey in the first place, you will need to gather some glass bottles to store the honey inside. Every 3 glass pieces will make 3 glass bottles. If you want to gather the honey safely, you will need a campfire as well. The campfire will make the bees docile and not attack you when you collect the honey. Of course, in order to get the honey in the first place, you will need a beehive or a bee nest to collect from. You can find them in plains, flower forests, forests, and hill biomes.

In a Nutshell:

To get honey in Minecraft, simply right-click, while having the glass bottles equipped in your Hotbar, on the bee nest after it is smoked with a campfire, which is to avoid angering the bees inside, to collect the honey. You can tell if a hive is ready for harvesting by looking for gooey honey spilling out of the beehive.

First, you will want to gather some sand and cook it into the glass. While you can just eat honey, if you want to make honey blocks you will need quite a bit of glass bottles so make extra if you are considering utilizing honey.

Next craft some glass bottles by arranging them in a “V” shape in a crafting table.

Once your glass is done cooking, and your glass bottles are made, you can get a campfire ready to go as well. Combine 3 sticks, coal/charcoal, and 3 raw logs of wood in your crafting menu to get this step taken care of. After you have your preliminary requirements taken care of, you can head out to find a bee nest.

Bee nests will spawn naturally in flower fields, plains biomes, flower forests, just about any forest, and hill biomes. Look near flowers and listen for the buzzing bees. If you do not have any forests or other biomes that you can find bees in, you can plant a sapling and a flower within 2 blocks of each other and grow the tree. There is a 5% chance that the sapling grows into a mature tree with a beehive on it already.

Once you have located your bee nest you just need to place a campfire underneath it to smoke the bees. You can collect honey without smoking the bees, but the bees will attack you in this case. Since campfires are cheap and easy to make, it is not worth the hassle of fighting bees to gather honey. Also consider that beehives will not naturally spawn more bees, any bee that you kill is slowing down the honey generation, so treat them with care.

Simply right-click on the bee nest after it is smoked with a campfire to collect the honey. You can tell if a hive is ready for harvesting by looking for gooey honey spilling out of the beehive.

Once you see honey spilling out of the hive or nest you can right-click on it with a bottle to gather the honey. There is only so much you can collect at a time, and the longer you wait the more honey you can gather up to 5 honey bottles.

That’s all you need to gather honey safely in Minecraft.

You cannot craft a bee nest in Minecraft, but you can craft a beehive. Beehives and bee nests are functionally identical and have no difference in practicality or efficiency. To craft a bee nest you will need 3 honeycomb and 6 wooden planks of any kind. You can even mix and match different kinds of wood if you need to.

To gather honeycomb right click on a beehive or nest with shears equipped and the honeycomb will drop out as an item. Your nest or hive will need to be smoked as well otherwise the bees will aggro onto you.

Alternatively, if you want to keep a more natural-looking beehive, you can generate them by growing saplings next to flowers. Each tree that is within 2 blocks of a flower has a 5% chance to generate a beehive. Beehives require a silk touch tool in order to obtain, while you can break it with your hands, it will not drop as an item unless you use a silk touch enchanted item.

Bee nests do not require silk touch in order to obtain. Whenever you break a beehive or nest, the bees that reside inside will accompany that beehive/nest.

Honeycomb is used to make bee nests as well as honeycomb blocks. In the upcoming 1.17 update you can use honeycomb to prevent copper from oxidizing and craft candles. As it stands, honeycomb is only used to craft bee nests and honeycomb blocks in 1.16 versions of Minecraft.

To make honeycomb blocks you just need to combine 4 honeycombs into a 2x2 arrangement in your crafting menu.

Beehives and bee nests should be approached with caution. You can definitely get away with gathering honey without the smoking process, but it keeps you safe and prevents you from killing any bees along the way. Once you know how to approach bee hives/nests you can easily acquire large amounts of honey and honeycomb for whatever purposes you need.

Congratulations, you now know how to peacefully gather honey from beehives and bee nests. Bees are cute little mobs that can add some life to a garden, support crop growth, and provide honey. You can line up multiple hives to gather dozens to hundreds of honey at a time. Try to keep them safe and they will return the favor.