Guide for Using Royal Jelly and Bee Positioning in the Hive (2024)

I'd like to go over my previous posts on the state of my hive and demonstrate my strategy for using Royal Jelly to improve the bees in my hive. I feel that most people use their jelly haphazardly, but there are some things that should be considered in order to get more out of your hive.

There are two major questions to answer for how to arrange your hive and use jelly: "Which bees convert honey the fastest?", and "What am I trying to accomplish?".

Which bees convert honey the fastest?[]

Each bee has a stat page that describes how much pollen they convert into honey and how much time it takes them to do so. While these numbers represent how fast a bee would theoretically convert pollen into honey, it never reaches that rate due to travel time between its slot and your container. This time can be reduced by standing closer to the hive while converting, but also by placing the bee lower and towards the center. The idea here is that if a bee has a high conversion rate, it should be placed lower in the hive, and if it has a low conversion rate, it should be placed higher in the hive. This minimizes travel time for bees with high conversion rates, bringing them closer to their actual conversion rate. Why you would prioritize minimizing that distance for bees with higher conversion rates instead of lower conversion rates should be obvious (90% of 100 and 50% of 20 is a lot better than 90% of 20 and 50% of 100).

To demonstrate the impact of travel distance on conversion rate, take a look at the above table. Rate shows the theoretical rate at which that bee converts pollen to honey. The columns right of that show how that rate drops when the bee takes the amount of seconds to travel between hive and container labeled at the top. Two seconds of travel time can cut the rate of conversion by anywhere from a third to a half!

This table also demonstrates the difference between bees with the same theoretical rate that convert different amounts at once. Looker, Bubble, Shocked, and Shy bees all have the same theoretical rate, but the first two convert for four seconds while the last two convert for two. This means that Shocked and Shy bees spend more time traveling to refill on pollen. This causes the impact of travel time to hurt them much more than it does Looker or Bubble bees. In general, travel time impacts bees that convert for lower amounts of time more greatly. It should also be mentioned that four bees with some of the highest conversion rates (Honey, Photon, Bear, and Lion) have this short conversion time.

Finally, bee level and movement speed also have an impact on how effective a bee is at converting, but base values are more important and lead to the same conclusion as levels do, and movement speed doesn't seem as important to fuss over as base rate. Going back to a previous example, Shocked and Shy are both faster than Looker and Bubble, but their greater speed doesn't make up for having to make that extra trip. They already have the second-highest speed in the game, but would need to be well past the current high to offset this drawback.

In general, if the base rate of a bee is 40 or higher, try to move it higher into the hive. If it is 30 or below, move it lower. The way you move a bee higher or lower is by comparing a newly transformed bee with ones that are already that type, and then converting the highest one (thereby keeping the lowest one) if you want it to be lower, or converting the lowest one (thereby keeping the highest one) if you want it to be higher.

What am I trying to accomplish?[]

It is always important to understand what your goals are so that your hive can be tailored to suit those goals. Here are a few examples:

• I want to fill my container in as little time as possible.
• I want to complete a particular quest.
• I want to last longer in the Ant Challenge.
• I want to have more colored bees.

These are all goals I have had in the past, and I used my Royal Jelly to transform bees until I would get ones that would better serve these goals. For example, if I needed to complete a quest that would require collecting a lot of Haste tokens, I would keep more Hasty Bees than usual. My general strategy towards collecting pollen is to have as many bees as possible with Bomb tokens, as I see chaining them to be the most effective and consistent way to collect pollen, so I regularly have kept bees that drop Bomb tokens and transformed other bees that didn't. I will go into more detail about this as I describe how my hive changed over time.

Event Bees and "Maxing Out"[]

One tip I like to bring up is about how I use Gummy Bee in my hive. At some point, once you've used enough Royal Jelly, your hive gets to a state where you don't really see how it could get better very quickly. You may want another Baby Bee, but if you use Royal Jelly on something in your hive, you will probably end up with something worse than what is already there rather than the bee you're looking for. This is where Gummy Bee comes in, or any Event bee you are willing to transform into other bees (in other words, don't do this with an Event bee that has been turned gifted, as you will lose the gifted quality). When looking to replace something in my hive, I would start by transforming the Gummy Bee. If I liked what I got better than something else, I started transforming that other bee. Eventually, I would likely be left with something that I didn't want. I would then use my Gummy Bee Jelly to replace it with a Gummy Bee. Doing this, I was eventually able to avoid ever having a bee in my hive that I wanted less than my Gummy Bee, avoiding a situation like having to hold onto an undesired Rare bee until I could get more jelly and lucky enough to get something decent.

I personally decided to do this with Gummy Bee and continue to do so because it seems like the weakest Event bee I have (Puppy Bee is probably worse in general, but has a good gifted bonus, so it shouldn't serve this purpose for me). If you have some other Event bee in mind to do this with, that may be fine too.

Sifting the Hive[]

These are all of the pictures I have of my hive over time. Because these pictures were all taken in a kind of "finished state" for the time and had so much time between them, it is hard to show the concepts described above for each change. Here are some notable changes:

• May 31st to June 18th: Exhausted -> Bubble, Exhausted -> Baby, Demo -> Fire, Hasty -> Exhausted, Demo -> Fire. Between these two times, five bees were changed into better bees. I was willing to drop Exhausted Bees as I started to get higher amounts of Polar Power, giving all my bees enough energy that I didn't see infinite energy as enough of an upside. I shifted towards more colored bees since I had recently gotten Cobalt Bee and Crimson Bee, which become more effective with more colored bees around. A Fire Bee took the Gummy Bee's old slot, so I put the Gummy Bee into the slot of a Demo Bee in the middle.
• June 18th to July 19th: This was when the Ant Challenge was released, and a huge glut of Royal Jelly to go with it. Here is a fair example of what a hive might look like after implementing this strategy of putting high conversion bees low and low conversion bees high. Music, Lion, Diamond, and Shy bees are near the bottom while Baby and Rage bees are near the top. Previous versions of my hive did not have Rage Bees because the Rage token wasn't useful for gathering pollen. Now, with the Ant Challenge in place and big Royal Jelly rewards available for players who go deep, having some Rage Bees around is valuable.
• August 15th to September 19th: I ended up getting a second gifted Frosty Bee in the top-right corner of my hive. Since Frosty Bee has the same conversion rate as a Basic Bee, I wanted to put it higher up in my hive, so I converted the lower one into something else.