Apiaries are a good source of food and trade goods in Manor Lords, but you’ll need to unlock them first.
Food is an important resource in Manor Lords. You can always check your supplies of food and firewood by checking the barrel next to the region name at the top of the screen, and running out of either resource will quickly cause your approval rating to plummet and your citizens to leave.
That's why it's important to develop as many food sources as possible for each settlement. One such source is apiaries (bee farms), which can produce honey and wax. You can't do too much with these resources in the 0.7 release of Manor Lords, but you can at least make use of them as a source of food and trade goods.
How to Unlock Apiaries
Unlike most buildings, you need to unlock apiaries in the development tree if you want to place them in a region. To get development points, you need to increase the settlement size by building and upgrading burgage plots. You can then spend them by clicking on the region name at the top of the screen and opening the development tree.
Apiaries are in the left tree, which focuses on harvesting natural resources like berries and wild animals. You can buy access to apiaries immediately, then spend a second point to allow apiaries to generate wax. Pay attention to the game's warning: while you can build more than two apiaries in a region, you won't get extra honey or wax after you build the second one.
What to Do with Honey and Wax
You won't get honey from an apiary unless you assign a family to tend it. A beekeeper needs to work at the apiary to produce honey, so adding extra families to each set of hives should produce more honey. On the other hand, apiaries generate wax passively, and any family assigned to a storehouse can collect it.
Some players have reportedly had trouble with honey production, but this is either because of isolated early-access bugs or because they don't realize that beekeepers usually grab the honey they produce and bring it to a granary immediately. This means that apiaries can appear to be constantly empty unless you keep a close eye on them. For a better indicator, try hovering over the loaf of bread icon to the right of the region name and see how much honey is in your storage.
You also don't need to worry about the apiary's location. Every region on the map has plenty of grass and wildflowers, so your apiary's location has no impact on honey production or crop yields. As such, the best place to put them is close to your granary. This way your beekeepers will have less walking to do.
Eagle-eyed players may also notice that Manor Lords mentions a couple of items related to honey and wax:
- The burgage tavern requirement mentions several drink varieties, including mead (a drink made from fermented honey).
- Candles appear on the commodities list, and you can start a trading route to buy them, but in build 0.7 there's no way to craft candles and no building that calls for them.
With this in mind, the best way to use these resources for now is to supplement your food stores with honey, and to sell the wax you create with a trading route. Since wax has no other uses for now, selling it is a guilt-free way to gain regional wealth.
Platform(s) PC , Xbox One , Xbox Series X , Xbox Series S Released April 26, 2024 Developer(s) Slavic Magic Publisher(s) Hooded Horse Genre(s) Strategy , City Builder
