Bee Husbandry

[Sidewinder7]

One way to limit the number of bees is by balancing the amount of food they eat, so the number of bees you can keep(either alive, or eating enough to be breed-able) is based on the number(and quality?) of plants being grown. This would make beekeeping the perfect activity for botanists when there are no planter boxed available.

On the topic of making more bees:
In all likelihood, there will be a machine ("Bee Vat", "Bee-O-Matic", etc) that is used to produce bee eggs from samples. Possible candidates for samples include:


honey samples (either consuming the sample or just scanning it)
pros: makes honey more important
cons: might require modifying chemical code, and will require a specific behavior for when to dna carrying chemicals are mixed

dna samples (collected by using a BNA extractor on a bee or something)
pros: more straightforward
cons: might be encroaching on genetic's territory

misc drops(bees sometimes cough up 'dense nectar' or something)
pros: straightforward, would make sense to be single use, encouraging bees to be kept and fed so that they might drop these.
cons: requires walking around searching through junk on the floor to find.

another possibility is requiring queen bees for dna.
pros: makes sense
cons: almost entirely gates beekeeping behind acquiring royal jelly

any thoughts?