Minecraft's latest Java update adds bees, hives and honey

The latest Minecraft Java edition update is chock full of bugs - bees!

Bees are a brand new neutral mob that will quite happily bumble around, gathering pollen from their favourite flowers and flying back home to their nests to make honey.

They won't hurt you unless you hurt them - but if you do hurt the bees and provoke them into stinging you they'll leave their stinger behind and die, and won't even drop any items for your trouble. You monster.

Bee Nests naturally spawn in Flower Forests, Plains and Sunflower Plains biomes. They have favourite flowers (aww) and like sharing the location of their favourites with other bees (AWW). Do not just whack a bee nest to try and collect the block though! You'll need to use a tool with silk touch to safely get the block with the bees stored inside, otherwise the nest will be destroyed.

During the nighttime or if it's raining, your bee pals will chill in their nests. If you want to keep them in chill-mode during the day, you can place a campfire under the nest or hive.

These new mobs will help with your farming by pollinating your crops when they're on the way back to their nests. You'll also be able to build a beehive to have your very own colony right on your doorstep, allowing you to harvest their honey and keep them nice and close to your farm.

There are five levels of honey (the amount contained in the nest), and once it reaches level five you're able to harvest it using an empty glass bottle. You can also harvest honeycomb by shearing a full-honey hive or nest, and you'll need the honeycomb if you want to create an artificial hive to house your bee friends.

If you haven't played Minecraft in a while, now is a wonderful time to jump back in. As well as the addition of bees, the game has received plenty of updates, and has even gained official ray tracing support on PC.

You can check out all the details for the latest update on the Minecraft website. There's no word just yet when bees will migrate over to the game's cross-platform Bedrock edition.