The buzz about town is that Minecraft just added bees

We no longer have bees in the real-world, the last one having left to fly to its home planet of HV-1 last Tuesday, so Minecraft has memorialised our buzzy buds by adding them as a new mob. The fuzzy little dancers are a neutral mob who’ll happily fill your game with honey for you to enjoy, and have just set up a hive in the 19W34A snapshot. Let’s smoke out some details, shall we?

Bees in Minecraft lead quite a life. They’ll spawn in the Flower Forests, Plains, and Sunflower Plains biomes and hunt for a nest. With a home block settled upon, they’ll get to buzziness, hunting down flowers to collect pollen before returning home. If they make this round-trip without encountering any issues, the home nest will start filling with honey.

You can breed your own bees using flowers, and they’ll return the favour by pollinating your crops. If you want to get beerious about all this, you can build a hive with wood and honeycomb to keep them closer to home. A home hive makes it easier to collect the sweet honey that the bees make, which you can drink or craft into sugar.

It’s all so wholesome, and there’s some surprisingly complex behaviour. Bees will have favourite flowers and will share this information with their hive friends. You can use campfire smoke to calm the little buzzers. And, sadly, if you attack them and they sting you they’ll die. So don’t do that, eh? Bee excellent to one another.

This snapshot is a test leading up to the official Minecraft Java 1.15 update, which is out whenever they decide it's ready. If you want to play it now, you can click the Installations tab on the official Minecraft launcher and add the latest snapshot from there.

This is Craig, RPS's bee co-correspondent (alongside Sin "Honeycomb" Vega), signing off.

Disclosure: Our weekend editor, Jay Castello, sometimes writes for Minecraft's website.