Rusty’s Retirement – Bulb Hives Guide (How to Harvest Hives and Get Bees)

A quick guide on what you need to know about Bulb Hives in Rusty’s Retirement.

Guide to Animals

By CloneOrNot.

How can bees be created?

Bees spawn from plots, animal feeders and Rusties house:

How to harvest hives?

Once they are ready an exclamation mark will appear (like the image).

Then you can click on it to mark it for harvest, at which point forbric will come to collect the biofuel. Note that the max biofuel these can store is infinite. So no need to instantly click it.

Bee AI Explained

Bees follow the base of butterflys. Meaning they can both fly to flowes and bushes in addition to Bulb hives.

The following base movement guides are similar to the butterfly:

• They will try and cycle between flowers and bushes.
• If there are no bushes or flowers (depending on the current action in the cycle) a random location is choosen.
• At each plant they will wait between 5-12 seconds.
• For each tile between them an there target they need around 5 seconds.

Changed conditions:

• If they pick the same flower after each other, they will instead pick a berry bush.

Additionall conditions due to hives:

• When moving to flowers or bushes they will get 1 stack of pollen.
• Once a Bee has 16 stacks it will move to a hive to give it a stack.

When do Bulb hives produce biofuel?

Bulb hives need 8 nectar to be ready for harvest, which the produces X biofuel for each X nectar collected.

Production speed of Bulb hives

A Bee can collect one pollen every 13.5 seconds. Which results in one nectar every 3.6 minutes. So with one Bee a hive would need 28.8 minutes.

For this to work there has to be the following conditions met:

• There is exactly one berry bush in the beehive range
• There is exactly one flower in the beehive range
• Both flower and bush are directly next to each other

If eitehr condition 1 or 2 are not met, the efficiency will be reduced by atleast 50%. Meaning the beehive needs atleast 59.6 minutes to completion.

If the space between the bushes and flowers increase or one is missing, the flying time increases, making the progess slower as well.

Follwing formula can be used to calculate gain:

• If flower and bush exists
  • FD = average distance between bushes and flowers
  • Time for 1 biofuel to be produced (seconds) = (FD * 5 + 8.5) * 16
• If only one of both exsists
  • Time for 1 biofuel to be produced (seconds) = 0.5 * (2.55 * 5 + 8.5) * 16 = 170

Each bee active in the area reduces the time.

Simplified example of an efficient Layout

In this layout a fower and a bush is nearby. Additionally due to the field near by, there are 2 more bees.

Time for 1 biofuel to be produced (seconds) = ((1 * 5 + 8.5) * 16) / 3 = 72

Bulb Hive