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.