I Call Bull on Princesses Dying after 200 Generations

You probably seen the rumours. The baffled questions of "Why did my princess disappear?" and "Where did my bees go?" then the replies.... "Oh, they die off after 200 generations or so..."

After running these bees in a chunkloaded area for best part of a month, it's pretty clear that they haven't popped their clogs after 200 generations, as some have alluded to.

1296 generations  

 1018 generations

 1273 generations

1249 generations 

1256 generations

So, what can we conclude has happened to all the missing drones and princesses?

Ignoble stock will die off eventually.
Natural pristine stock will do well provided the area is chunk loaded.
Carefully genetically modified pristine stock (i.e those made with the highest quality serum) will do well provided area is chunkloaded.
Poorly genetically modified stock (those made with poor quality serum) may be subject to changes in their genetic code that makes them unstable and may die off... who knows?!
You may have further issues with using bees that do not have "standardized traits" so that the drones all have different traits and won't stack.

So, for successful bee factories:

They have to be chunkloaded otherwise you may lose your bees for no apparent reason.
Use only pristine stock.
Genetically modify bees with only the highest quality serums.
If your having trouble standardizing traits, reduce the fertility to low so that there is no issue of drone stacking or overspill.

Botany

Well here I go again, exploring uncharted territory, this time with botany flowers. I've been having fun making a semi-automated system but now I'm stuck on how to get to the next step: mass pigment production.

 This is my garden set up, standard 3x3 Forestry Farm, but outer edge is not garden land. On each side, a Vacuum Chest from EnderIO.

Lower down view of water tower.

 Flicking the switch "picks" the flowers which then flow to the edge of the garden. I found this the easiest way to clear a whole garden. Manual picking results in flowers growing back as quickly as you fill your inventory.

A few get stuck under the tower. Another vacuum chest would fix this but I'm lazy. 

Underneath, the farm.

 Corridor of full set of garden circuit boards.

 Internal workings

 Left chest feeds into pigment storage. Right chest brings in picked flowers and germlings.

Pigment storage... pretty coloursssss.........

 Flowers and germlings in the chest.

A standard craft bench soon became quite tedious when crafting pigments. A Machinists workbench is a little quicker as you do not need to place the flower into the crafting grid each time, regardless of its type.

Despite the fact it's a manual process, a gardens's worth of flowers yield a fair amount of dye. (This is not a gardens worth!)

Any ideas on how I can automate the 80 different pigments from vast amounts of flowers, the majority of which with unique meta-data?! Arggghh! 

Butterflies

The plains biome where my bee factory is located is adjacent to a canyon, then surrounded by desert. Butterflies don't particularly like desert biomes, so they remain within the confines of our small oasis.

Shooting them with portal turrets provided some amusement, until I decided it would be wise to kill all the butterflies using a server command.

They'll be back.

Tidy Orchard

Fixed it up. Looks much better.

Quick Fruit Tree Farm

I set up a quick fruit tree farm; I'm happy with the storage area for the fruit, but the farm itself looks pretty scruffy. I'll expand the farm at some point and set the trees in avenues, so that it looks more like an orchard.

Spreadsheet now includes Juice Yields

Tonight I did some geekery, and calculated juice yield for each type of fruit. (For each of the obtainable recipes.) The fruits are true to form; tiny, stony cherries produce very little juice, big juicy grapefruit produce lots!

My findings have been recorded on the spreadsheet here.

I changed around the room I designated for making the liquids. To ensure that no left over juice is left in the Fruit Press, or any mixing of juices, I've placed a dedicated pair of Fruit Press and Bottler for each type of juice.

I also set up machines dedicated to making all the different mashes.

Next time, I'll be adding another floor below to incorporate the machines needed for the other recipes, and setting up a fruit tree farm outside to supply the raw materials. 

Binnie Alcohol Recipe List

The last few days I have been playing with Binnie's alcohol, so below you will find my full findings, in the hope that someone may know the recipes that I can't work out, or be able to confirm what I suspect, that the recipes are not in the current version. You can view the full GoogleDocs file here.
If you know any of my missing recipes, please get in touch so I can complete my list!

Sorry the formatting is so rubbish on this. Silly Blogger.

New server, new bee factory.

Main Alveary Block

The old server is dead, and we're on a new server, we're again playing FTB Direwolf 20, and we're currently on version 1.7.10.

Thanks to some kind comments on the youtube videos, I decided that I still have a weath of knowledge to share with you all. Despite some extensive searching, it still seems that no one else has blogged/videoed their adventure into Binnie's mods. The new video series will build on what I taught you in the first set of videos, and I'll also be showing you some of the other aspects of Binnie's, such as alcohol and botany, as well as recapping some basics such as the lumbermill and its associated machines.

This factory has been built with the sole purpose of passing on some of what I have learnt, and getting some information about Binnie's Mods out there on the web. The server I play on is a whitelisted server, where I have the power of the admin. (So yes, a good chunk of this has been built in creative.) However, despite the fact I have basically cheated my way to making a nice little factory to teach you all, it is fully functional. There is no creative power, infinite resource barrels or infinite liquids.

This means, that when the video series is finished, and I actually start playing a survival mode game, the factory will be still able to function and run without any additional cheating required.

Enjoy the tour and check back for when the videos are posted. In the meantime, check out my previous videos in the links below.

Bee Base Intro
Genetic Machines
Making an Alveary

Lumbermill, wood worker, tileworker etc. Additional machines for processing bi-products and making polish. 

Genetics Area.

View of outside. The closest alveary is my "base bee" larvae spawner. (See previous videos for what I mean by "base bee".)

Genetically modified walnut trees, sporadically being bonemealed by autonomous activators.

Frame production and fertiliser production.

Seed oil tank. Impregnated sticks and casing production.

Underneath the walnut tree farm. Squeezers ready to make seed oil. Sag mill to smash up wheat to make seeds for even more seed oil. 

Mushroom farm, pollinated by Fungal Queen's. MFR fertiliser can be switched on for a quick boost of mushrooms. (Mushrooms are needed to make yeast for alcohol production.)

Power room. Good ol' fast engines converting EU to RF. 

Biomass and ethanol production.

Alcohol production area. WIP.

Youtube videos coming soon

Just a quick update as I know there is a few people using my blog as a resource for "how to" use Binnie's mods. I have spent the last couple of day configuring streaming software so I can give a video tutorial on the basics of genetics.

Here's a link to my google+ page, where the videos will be appearing.

:)