Giant Bee Honey

Honey from Giant Bee hives

Giant Bee Honey is a hive product in ARK: Survival Evolved and ARK: Survival Ascended that survivors eat, throw as bait, put on a fishing rod and use in recipes. Both games describe it as something that attracts creatures.

Ways to use honey

• Food: eaten directly, it gives a survivor a good amount of food.
• Bait: used from the hotbar, it is thrown on the ground and draws in nearby creatures. The ARK Wiki adds that this can unstick an alternative taming that will not progress, such as a Noglin unwilling to attack another creature, with no loss of taming effectiveness.
• Water: thrown into water, it calms an aggressive Leedsichthys.
• Taming: the Roll Rat, Moschops, Dire Bear and Megatherium accept it, and the Liopleurodon does for a temporary tame; here it works like kibble worth 80 food.
• Fishing: it serves as bait on Fishing Rods, as Sap and Leech Blood do.

Recipes with honey

Our ASA records count 5 recipes: Sweet Vegetable Cake and the ARK Anniversary Surprise Cake (2 honey each), Extraordinary Kibble and Little Ratfish Treats! (1 each), and the Bladewasp Hive, which takes 20. ASE has 7, among them Baked Honey Loaf, Braggot Mead at 10 honey and Extraordinary Augmented Kibble.

Gathering it

A tamed Giant Bee produces a Bee Hive that you can collect honey from. Wild hives give honey too, on a fifteen-minute timer, though bees may come out of a hive you harvest. The wiki recommends a Dire Bear over gathering by hand: it gathers three times as fast as normal without damaging the hive or angering the bees. Its map notes mention stacked hives in the Emerald Forest on Valguero, the Cave of the Bees on Crystal Isles (best cleared first and worked with an Ankylosaurus), and Honey Stones on Fjordur, harvested like an Oil Rock, which the wiki calls useful for an early Andrewsarchus tame. Loot adds another source: 44 crate types can contain honey, for example Genesis Blue and Genesis Cyan. Our records list it on 14 maps.

Keeping it fresh

Honey weighs 0.1, and our records give it a stack size of 1. It spoils after 1200 seconds, or 20 minutes; the wiki suggests a Refrigerator and notes that a piece attached to a fishing rod keeps indefinitely. On servers where honey does stack, split off a single piece before throwing it as bait, or the whole stack is thrown and cannot be recovered.