Honey Bottle Challenge

Not only are bees critically important to our ecosystem, they’re also in danger of steep decline. That’s why we’ve partnered with WWF to help the bee, the new true star of Minecraft (Steve and Alex, bring it up with your agent) by raising money for WWF’s efforts to protect bees and other important species.  

So far we’ve made a $100,000 donation to WWF and we’re giving them 62.5% of the proceeds from the new Character Creator Bumblebee costume in the Minecraft Marketplace. Do we also have beautiful bee merch for sale, made of certified organic cotton and manufactured in renewable-energy powered factories, with all net proceeds going to WWF? Sadly no. I mean, sadly yes! I mean, yes! Hooray yes!

As part of our bee celebrations, we want to get YOU involved! This weekend, we want you to harvest honey bottles. Get/craft an empty bottle, approach a bee nest, then fill it up with delicious honey. How many? Ooooh well we’ve been pretty impressed with how you’ve taken on previous challenges, so let’s see what you’re made of! We want to see if the Minecraft community can harvest 50 million honey bottles this weekend!

WHAT?!

Trust us, this is very doable! Previously we’ve asked you to place coral blocks to help the oceans and to place bamboo to help WWF help pandas. Both times you’ve managed to achieve these challenges incredibly quickly. You’ve probably already completed this one, and I haven’t even finished telling you about it yet. To get updates about how many honey bottles you’ve harvested, how close you are to hitting the target and when you’ve managed it, follow us on Twitter!

(Oh and fair warning: make sure there isn’t a bee inside the nest/hive when you harvest the honey. Unless you want to deal with one angry bee! And we have to deal with enough swarms of angry insects in the Mojang offices already thank you very much.)

ABOVE: A video created with our partners at WWF to show why we're committed to saving the hard-working yet humble bee!

This isn’t even everything we’ve got planned (seriously, we’re celebrating bees at Mojang more than my own son’s birthday) ((look, Tom Jr., when you learn to successfully pollinate flowers, then maybe we can talk about getting you a small cake)). On December 17, come back to Minecraft.net for a sweet surprise…  

What could this surprise be? A colour photo of me eating honey out of that aforementioned trough? You’ll just have to wait and see. No. Something much better! Bee-ter? OK, that’s enough. Article over. Good luck with the challenge, and thank you for helping us, help WWF!