Drone Bee

A bee from the old Primitive Plus apiary

Before v258.0 brought the Giant Bee into the core game, the Primitive Plus DLC of ARK: Survival Evolved had bees of its own, and the Drone Bee was one of them. The ARK Wiki marks it as removed with that version and keeps it apart from the Giant Bee. The in-game text reads: "The drone bee lives to mate with the queen to produce worker bees for the apiary"

Finding drone bees

They turn up rarely when harvesting berry bushes. Large herbivores that strip many bushes quickly, such as the Bronto or the Trike, make the search easier.

Breeding bees in the Apiary

Whenever an Apiary held a Queen Bee and a Drone Bee (at least 1 of each), it turned out 14 Drone Bees plus 20 Worker Bees every 2 minutes. Adding more queens or drones did not change that output. The worker bees in turn made Beeswax and Honey. Inside the Apiary, a Drone Bee's spoil time was doubled.

Our records list one recipe that takes it: the Worker Bee, which uses 1 Drone Bee. A Drone Bee weighs 0.1, and a stack holds 200 for a total of 20.

After patch 258.0

The wiki notes that the 258.0 patch of May 30, 2017 removed the Apiary. Since then, Beeswax has to be collected from giant beehives, found mostly in the redwood biome.