Taking Inventory: Honey Bottle

A couple of months back, we featured the Honey Block in our Block of the Week series, and so now it’s time to feature its... er... bottlier cousin, the honey bottle.

Honey bottles, like honey blocks, were added to Minecraft in version 1.15 – the Buzzy Bees update. As the name suggests, they’re obtainable from bees – specifically, by hitting the use key on a beehive or bee nest while holding a glass bottle.

But hold up. You can’t just start merrily hitting use on every beehive you see. That approach will get you (a) not much honey and (b) stung. Instead, I recommend using a more cautious method.

Approach the hive or bee nest slowly and inspect it from a distance. Is there honey dripping out of the sides? If so, that’s a good sign that there’ll be something to collect. Then, make yourself a campfire and carefully place it under the hive so that the smoke billows upward into the block.

Smoke calms bees, y’see, which means that they’ll be less upset that you’re stealing all their honey. Once the nest is pacified, a gentle click with your glass bottle will yield you a full bottle of honey. Remove the campfire, and your quest is complete.

Now, what are you going to do with that bottle? Well, I highly recommend drinking it. In fact, it’s the only food in the game that comes in a bottle. It’ll restore three chunks of hunger and remove any poison that’s afflicting you. That puts honey a step up from drinking a bucket of milk – which removes all potion effects, positive or negative. Though it does take a little longer.

Other things you can do with honey include crafting blocks of honey (which, as we’ve already established, are pretty neat) with four bottles arranged in a square in a crafting grid. You can also make sugar – one bottle of honey in a crafting grid all on its lonesome will give you three piles of sugar. Sweet.

There’s some real-world truth to the idea of honey curing poison. For millennia, honey has been used to treat all kinds of different ailments – from burns to ulcers to stomach problems. It’s a part of both ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine, though Western medicine has not yet found strong evidence of its effectiveness beyond dressing small wounds.

There’s also some truth to the idea that you should set a campfire under a hive before trying to harvest from it. Humans have known since ancient times that smoke calms bees, but the exact mechanism was unknown until much more recently. Put simply, the smoke masks the chemicals that bees use to communicate – interrupting their defensive response and allowing the beekeeper to open the hive with less fear of attack.

Finally, in the honey block article I promised you a disgusting story about how honey is made, so here it is. You probably know that bees like flowers, and that’s because their nectar contains sugar. Some of the bees in the hive – known as forager bees – find flowers, crawl over them, suck the nectar up through a special tube, and put it in their honey stomach – which is different to their food stomach. It takes a forager bee more than an hour, visiting more than a thousand flowers, before that stomach is full.

Here’s where it gets icky. The forager bees then fly back to the hive, and spew it up into the mouths of hive bees who stay at home. The hive bees then eat and spew up the honey into the mouth of the next hive bee along, and the next bee along, and so on in long chains. There are tens of thousands of these bees in each hive. During this process, the water in the nectar dries up and the fluid gets thicker and thicker. Eventually the chain reaches a honeycomb, where it gets spewed into a cell.

But the process doesn’t end there. Bees generate a lot of body heat, and they keep the cells at a temperature of about 35C (95F), flapping their wings to circulate the air to evaporate more water, until it’s dry enough to keep the resulting fluid from going bad. Finally, the bees cap the cells with wax to seal them. Eventually a beekeeper comes along and harvests the resulting product, which millions of children all over the world then spread on toast.

So next time you’re contemplating a squirt of honey on your breakfast, maybe have a little think about how many bee stomachs that it might have passed through on its way to your plate. Yuck.