Harvesting Honeycombs in 'Minecraft' Is Deadly: Here's How to Stay Alive

Some games were just designed for tinkerers to spend hundreds of hours of their lives on. For me, whenever I play a Bethesda RPG, I just find myself getting swamped in side quests, and pickpocketing sleeping townsfolk until the epic quest I was selected for at the start of the game becomes a distant memory.

Minecraft is one of those games that's a time-waster's delight, brimming with side quests that are added almost every day. Like gathering honeycombs. Here's how to get it.

You'll need to find a bee's nest in the game (or a hive, but more on that later) and bust out your in-game shears to excise the comb out. Every time you use shears on a nest, you'll secure yourself anywhere from one to three pieces of honeycomb.

But there are some cautionary measures to consider before going on a honeycomb hunt.

First, you're going to want to make sure that you're building a fire near the bee's nest, as the smoke from the fire disorients the creatures and prevents them from attacking you. Just make sure that you don't build the fire too close to the nest or it'll catch on fire and that's no bueno.

What you should first consider is that bees die shortly after stinging you in Minecraft (it takes about 20 seconds), and as you can probably surmise, the bees aren't exactly thrilled with the idea of someone coming into their hive and stealing their honeycombs with a giant pair of scissors.

Why would you care if the bees live or die after getting your hands on their sweet, sweet honeycomb? Well, they won't be alive anymore to produce any more honey for you, which defeats the purpose of everything we're trying to do here.

If you combine four pieces of honeycomb then you'll create a honeycomb block. This is a super-useful tool for breeding and manages the bees you care for in your beehive.

How do you make a beehive, you ask? Well, it's quite simple: All you need are six wooden planks and three honeycombs to get a beehive built.

Bees will then flock to the hives and help to produce honey, which is a valuable asset in Minecraft. You can use honey to cure poison and restore six of your Hunger meter. It also perishes 25 percent slower than most other food items in the game, but honestly, it should be much longer, considering that honey really doesn't have an expiration date. In fact, the honey found in King Tut's tomb was actually still edible when it was discovered 3,000 years after the pharaoh was buried.

So you've built the hives, but now you need bees to populate it. There are two ways to get this done: You can either leash the creatures or attract them with flowers.

Once they're in the hive, you'll know that the honey is available to be harvested when the hives are visibly dripping with honey.

So have you taken up the bee-harvesting life à la Bon Jovi? Or are taming axolotls more your thing?