Bee nests generate incorrectly

Update: I looked for a bee nests in the Flower Forest biome, and I only found One bee nest. I looked everywhere, and that is the only one that generated. And in the other biomes bee nests are supposed to generate in, I found none in the other biomes. It seems like the bee nests generation is not generating as much as its supposed to.

All bee nests i hace found generate at the bottom of trees

Can confirm this is happening to me on latest released Switch version. I've generated 3 hives so far and each has had the entrance facing the dang tree.

I experimented with this for quite a while. Despite what one of the duplicate reports stated, what I observed is that bee nests always generate with their openings facing toward the east, so that if the nest generates on the west side of the tree trunk, it will always be blocked.

*Possible workarounds:*

1. Break the block in front of the bee nest, or

2. Make sure all the bees in the area are inside a bee nest or beehive (for example, wait for nightfall), then break the bee nest with a tool enchanted with Silk Touch. Finally, place the nest so that it's opening is unobstructed.

(You need to make sure all bees are in a nest or hive because any bee that sees you break a nest or beehive will attack you, even if it lives in another nest.)

Tested with player-generated bee nests (planting (birch) tree by flower), & they always face east as well.

Playing on iPad iOS 14.6 Minecraft v 1.17.10. Have had only 2 bees’ nests generated on planted trees. Both had the opening facing the tree.

Also seeing this issue with 4 out of the 5 hives facing the tree. 

May I ask the convention used for the cardinal directions in Minecraft?

If the bee nests generate facing East, then the sun rises in the South.  Is this correct?

No, the sun rises in the east as you would expect. You can verify this by observing a sunflower. (Ironically, years ago there was a bug that made the sun rise in the North, which fooled some of us into thinking that sunflowers were facing south. The bug was fixed in 1.1.)

My statement above that the nests were always generated with their openings to the east was a bit speculative, based on my experiments growing about 150 trees that had about 8 or 10 nests attached, all of which faced east. I don't think it was mere coincidence, but it's possible that it was caused by some factor present in my world but not yours. But even if one of us is wrong, it isn't really important to straighten out the confusion because if the developers notice a conflict between the program logic and a bug report, they'll always believe the program logic.

Thanks for the clarification. 

My nests on the world my ticket was about, all generated at spawn, faced north except for one east-facing one, which would have been in dirt had it faced north.

Might be a seed-determined thing.

@unknown:: I think I understand why we reported different experiences!

You said you had one facing east which "would have been in dirt had it faced north". That makes me think that your nests mostly generated attached to the northern side of a log, but in one case there was a dirt block against the northern side and you believe it caused the nest to generate attached to the eastern side instead. So that would mean that to you, "facing X" means "attached to the X side of the log".

But that's not what it means to me. To me "facing X" means "with the following texture on the X side of the beehive":

When bees exit the nest, they always come out of the side this texture is on, the side with the "holes". (Similarly, the beehive has a texture on one side that has a slot for them to come out of—though some people have mistaken it for a handle.)

The problem being reported by this ticket is that nests sometimes generate with this texture against the log they're attached to, which stops the bees from getting out. I then added that it looks to me like the generated nest is always oriented so that this texture is on the eastern side, which would mean that any time a nest generates on the western side of a tree, the bees will be trapped inside.

I used "facing" in the same way you did.  The situation with the anomalous nest was as such: the tree it was attached to(birch) was on an incline next to a riverbank. The step it was on was 1 block in cross section with the next step (1 block rise) on the tree's north and adjacent to it.

The trunk of the tree had only one exposed block before the leaves started, and the nest was attached to the eastern side of this with the holes being on the nest's east.

This was a normal nest, I only found one on that world that was blocked.

You may be right, then, that the direction they face isn't as predictable as I was suggesting. It doesn't help that I did a sloppy job of writing my previous comment so that it doesn't even make sense to me now. Sorry if it left you confused.

But it's not critical that we resolve it between us. As I said earlier, if the developers find a conflict between what the code does and what we say, they'll just disregard our mistakes.

As of Beta 1.17.40.20, the bee nests now face the correct direction. But they now generate way to much in a world.

This ticket is about the direction, not how common they are. The excess generation of bee nests was listed as a known issue at the top of the changelog. It is being handled on Mojang's internal bug tracker and doesn't need a bug report here.