After learning to get a bee in Minecraft, you would start to wonder how getting honey works. That is expected, as the latter is a food substance produced from these insects that go from flower to flower. We also have other honey-related guides we will mention in a moment that perhaps made you interested. Although not a concern in Creative Mode, finding food is crucial in Survival Mode. If you didn’t know, honey restores 6 hunger or 3 chicken drums and has a 1.2 hunger saturation effect. It also erases any poison effects on the player. All that makes it pivotal to learn to get honey in Minecraft. Let’s begin.
1. Extract honey from a beehive
A beehive is an artificially created bee nest you can move around and place as you see fit. However, crafting a beehive requires you to find a bee nest (use the tips in our bee-finding guide linked above), then extract a honeycomb. We already taught you to get a honeycomb within Minecraft, so that shouldn’t be an issue. You need to approach the bees in their natural habitat carefully and use Shears to extract honeycomb from a bee nest. A bee or several bees will attack you as soon as honeycomb drops to the ground, even though they were neutral up until then.
You can use a campfire or a fire to prevent them from becoming aggressive. If they do, their sting will apply poison to you, which is fortunate in a way. After all, honey (although only the bottle, not the honeycomb) can cure poison. As mentioned, you can take the safe route and place a dispenser under the bee nest and let it collect honeycombs. We suggest that method, especially if your hunger is going down and your health points are in peril.
Fill your glass bottle with honey
With that said, once you have a beehive crafted, placed, and at level 5, you can use a glass bottle item on a beehive like this:
- Right-click the beehive block on Java Edition, Bedrock Edition, and Education Edition for PC and Mac.
- Tap the block on Pocket Edition for Android and iOS.
- Press the controller’s LT button on Xbox.
- Use the ZL button of the gamepad on Wii U and Nintendo Switch.
- Press the L2 button on your PlayStation controller.
The empty glass bottle item will turn into a honey bottle item. You can then drink it from your inventory or hotbar to gain the health boost we mentioned in the introduction and cure yourself of any poison effects. Note that, unlike other foods, you can consume a honey bottle even when your hunger bar is full, so be careful not to waste it. Also, drinking a honey bottle is 1/4 slower than consuming any other food (2 minutes and 30 seconds instead of 2 minutes). It also produces a special sound effect.
2. Get honey from a bee nest in Minecraft
We mentioned bee nests already, which probably made you wonder why that wasn’t the primary method if honey can be extracted directly. Well, a beehive doesn’t rely on coincidence—you can craft and group them, then build a bee farm for a reliable source of honey. Some clever players even found ways to make an automatic honey farm using dispensers and other items. Therefore, it’s what interests most people. However, if you only need a bit of honey to get through the day, stumbling upon a bee nest is a blessing.
You can approach a bee nest with a glass bottle and use the same commands to get a honey bottle. Likewise, you can craft and place a dispenser below a bee nest and put empty glass bottles. They will turn into honey bottles and be stored in the inventory of the dispenser without enraging the bees. Therefore, that’s the safer method unless you have a source of fire or a campfire. Like with honeycombs, once the dispenser’s inventory fills up, any extra honey bottles will be shot out. You can then pick them up manually or set up a hopper and a chest to store them.
3. Convert a honey block into a bottle of honey
The third way you can get honey in a bottle is to transform a block of honey into it. The problem is that honey blocks are crafted from 4 honey bottles and vice versa. Thus, this is only truly useful in multiplayer, where another player might have crafted one. Additionally, you might have unknowingly made one of these items, intending to use it for decoration. To reverse its creation, you need to craft and use a crafting table in Minecraft. Then, once the 3×3 crafting grid opens, place 4x glass bottle and 1x honey block in this order:
- First row — Place a glass bottle in the first and second squares. Put a honey block in the third square.
- Second row — Put a glass bottle in the first and second squares again. Leave the third one empty.
- Third row — Leave it empty.
If you did everything right, you will see a stack of 4 honey bottles appear in the lone square on the right-hand side. Note that the recipe is shapeless, and ours was one example. As long as 5 squares are filled with the right items, it’ll produce the result. For instance, you can leave the first row empty, then place items from the first row into the second, and those from the second into the third.
Before you try it, we’ll tell you that you cannot use a glass bottle on a honey block like with a beehive and bee nest.
4. Alternative ways to get honey in Minecraft
We focused on Survival Mode players until this point. Now’s the time to present two other options for getting honey. They only work if you are a multiplayer server administrator or enjoy single-player in another mode or with cheats. By this, we mean that you can switch to Creative Mode, open the inventory, search for “honey bottle” and drag the item to your inventory or hotbar. Alternatively, you can turn Minecraft cheats on, then use the following commands:
/@give p honey_bottle 1(For Java Edition PC or Mac between 1.15 and 1.91.1)/@give p honey_bottle 1 0(For Pocket Edition, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Windows 10 Edition, and Education Edition)