This is basically the same report as MCPE-58748 but for Java Edition since I couldn't find one.
Bees just disappear extremely quickly. I had one bee to begin with, which disappeared after a couple game days. Later I got a bee nest with 3 bees from an oak tree near my base. I bred two of them (for a total of 3 adult bees and 1 baby bee) and soon thereafter two of them seemed to have already disappeared again. So I bred the remaining two bees (for a total of 2 adult bees and 1 baby bee) and went off to do other duties. When I came back it seemed I had lost two bees again (yes, I checked the hives by standing next to them for a minute to listen for any sounds, and there were none).
A while later I was out harvesting my wheat and I spotted an adult bee and a baby bee flying together (see below for screenshot). It seemed pretty far away from the hives, but I thought (hoped) that they were doing their thing and they would return to their hive later.
After returning from a caving adventure I checked the hives and they were still not ready to harvest (the last time I harvested them was a long time ago). I went looking around for the bees and couldn't find a single one. I waited a while (several game days) and the hives still look abandoned. No bees to be seen anywhere. So it's safe to say my last two bees vanished as well.
A quick reddit search shows that I'm not the only one who's had this problem - there are complaints of disappearing bees from as far back as 7 months ago and as recent as 2 days ago.
I read a couple dozen of those posts and the theme seems to be that bees are happily suiciding on water, fire, cacti. I have not witnessed this happening with my bees but it seems plausible since I do have a natural waterfall near my base (around which I've arranged my crops), and an elevated campfire (for making it easier to spot my base from a distance).
There were also one or two comments saying that bees may randomly fly up and up without stopping, or otherwise randomly abandon their beehive/nest-based "neighborhood". Another commenter suggested that bees may also be entering solid blocks and suffocating inside, which has been a long-standing issue with animals that I know very well (although haven't observed recently).
Another type of comment suggested that maybe the bees could be attacking me and dying that way without me noticing. I can assure you that the few times I harvested honey from the hives I was very careful, attentive, and made sure that no bees were in or near the hives, and I would have surely noticed a bee stinging me. This hypothesis can be ruled out.
I'm making this report because I was actually pretty disappointed to lose all my bees, because I enjoyed this new feature surprisingly much, I was looking forward to having bees flying around outside my base and pollinating my crops, listening to the cute buzzing sounds they make when I'm harvesting... but it seems I can't have that. Apparently the only way to maintain a bee culture is to have them completely enclosed in a sanitized space. I'm not completely against that, I just don't have the materials or the motivation to build something like that right now.
I think that open-air bee farms should be viable. I think it's something to be expected by many players. Why not?
I remember that you have fixed suiciding behavior with other animals before.
So please, fix this (whatever the actual cause is - suiciding or wandering off). Make their AI smarter, or lock down their wandering. It shouldn't be hard for you to diagnose. I have attached a screenshot of my base. It's nothing unusual. Just a pretty natural environment. I've got chickens and sheep too - they're fine.
[media]The two beehives are next to the base entrance, near the top of the stone brick staircase.
The place where I last saw that adult & baby bee is a bit left of the waterfall - which is well past 20 blocks away from the hives (20 blocks is supposed to be the maximum wander distance according to this 20w12a snapshot summary video I watched recently).
The seed is: 4500432789051034519
(The world origin is very close to where my base is. Just look for the waterfall.)
World type: AMPLIFIED
All other options are default.
No mods.
Attachments
Comments 9
I've been experiencing the same issue. I have no planted berry bushes, however I do have water extremely close to the nest. They were name-tagged, so there is no way that they should have despawned, and there are people running in and out of my base 24/7 (I run a server) and nobody has reported the bees coming anywhere near my pond at any point. I moved them over from where I found them with silk touch, and there are no other nests for miles and miles, so they couldn't have just migrates nests. For now, I'm going to put the remaining bee's nest away until the next update. Hopefully this is fixed soon!
Related MC-159502. At least my case above could very well have been caused by that one, being on an island and the hive just few blocks away from ocean.
I notice that the bees will wander away from the hives, often across the village or area where they are based, and later the hives are "abandoned." Then I will come across bees in seemingly random remote spots, far from hives.
The wandering always seems to be to the west, or northwest.
Can anyone confirm that this happens if there is no water anywhere nearby? Otherwise, this might just be MC-159502.
If you observe that the bees seem to wander further away than 22 blocks: are you sure the bees only got there after you updated to 20w12a? They might have pathfinded there before the update to their AI and might just have gotten stuck far away from their home hive. Nevertheless, that would be a different issue than bees just disappearing, and would not be tracked here in this bug report. Please create a new one instead (if you're playing in the 1.16 snapshots and if we don't have a ticket already).
I can confirm that bees have disappeared in my world as well. This happened even after enclosing the bee farm in a dome within one chunk. I have attached a screenshot of my bee farm with chunk borders on. I used to have a dozen+ bees but they disappeared after I traveled far away for too long.
[media]
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@violine1101 Possible duplicate of MC-229321
I had the same "dying beehive / vanishing bees" phenomena on my new game. I have no idea how many bees the hive had to start with, but now it has none. It/they never attacked me, and the island base I have is fully lit, so no random mobs (except the occasional trader), either. Also, I haven't even harvested the honey (yet), and have basically ignored the bees so far, except planting few extra flowers closer to their hive.
Among the possibly related events, while exploring I saw twice a bee elsewhere (tens of chunks away), without beehive anywhere in sight. Both bees were dropping pollen so they should have been going for their hives, but instead they just randomly wandered around. (And both bees had later vanished, as usual for other random mobs.)
I do have berry bushes in their range, but according to wiki, bees are supposed to pollinate berry bushes, so I'd think if that task makes them getting killed, it would be a bug.
This on 1.15.2, survival, default settings.
Edit: forgot: all was good for at least 20'ish game days when I was still mostly on the island. But at some unknown point later the hive has died.