A hive you lock down in your own house, a jar of honey every four hours, and the quiet satisfaction of being the only person in the family whose profession runs while they're asleep.
One honest thing first: there is no Beekeeping skill in Britannia. No trainer, no grind, nothing to take to Grandmaster. What there is — and we checked our own shard's files rather than guessing — is a real beehive you can own, and it is a genuinely lovely piece of machinery.
The hive is a house item. Place it, lock it down, and the bees themselves appear beside it — a visible, humming swarm that vanishes again if you ever unlock it. From then on it quietly produces one honeypot every four hours, storing up to ten of them, which means a hive left alone for a day and a half is completely full. Double-click it and a jar of honey drops into your pack. It is the only profession in this magazine that works while you're logged out.
The catch is the price of admission: the hive is a Clean Up Britannia reward costing 80,000 points, which you earn by handing in junk — and the whole family's junk counts. So this is the profession you grow into rather than start on. Until then, the Beekeeper NPC in Buccaneer's Den will sell you honey at three gold a jar and you can get on with the rest of the sheet.
You get 700 skill points in total, which is seven skills at 100 (Grandmaster). Here is a sheet that works, and why each line is on it. You can load this exact spread on the hero sheet in the magazine and slide the numbers around.
| Skill | Points | Why it's here |
|---|---|---|
| Cooking | 100 | What honey is actually for. Honey plus dough makes sweet dough, and sweet dough is the gateway to cake mix, cookie mix and the good pies. |
| Inscription | 100 | What beeswax is actually for — gargoyle books and prophetic manuscripts all want it. Almost nobody on a shard knows this, which is why wax is cheap. |
| Magery | 100 | Inscription scribes spell scrolls, so the two go together by design. It also gets you Mark and Recall for the reagent run. |
| Meditation | 100 | Mana back fast, which is what scribing a few hundred scrolls actually needs. |
| Alchemy | 100 | The household's potions, and the greater potions a gardener needs as plant medicine. The cosy trades all lean on this one. |
| Carpentry | 100 | The house the hive gets locked down in, plus the furniture, barrels and shelves that make it an apiary rather than a box on the floor. |
| Tinkering | 100 | Tools, pots and scissors forever. Every homestead wants one tinker in it. |
| Total | 700 | of 700 |
80,000 Clean Up Britannia points. You get them by donating unwanted items, and everybody's loot junk counts — so put a bag by the door marked "for the clean-up" and let the fighters fill it. It is a long-term family project, which is rather the point of a beekeeper.
This trips everybody up. The hive produces jars of honey and nothing else. Beeswax is a separate item you buy, and the cheapest source is a provisioner or an innkeeper at 1gp — the Beekeeper NPC charges 2gp for exactly the same thing. Don't buy wax from the bee shop.
Skills go up by using them, and they go up fastest on a task that is just barely hard for you. Climb the rungs in order — each one stops paying off, and that's your cue to move up.
The hive is a long way off. Walk to a provisioner for cheap beeswax and to the Beekeeper NPC for honey, and start the Cooking and Inscription halves of the sheet immediately. Nothing here is gated on owning a hive.
An oven, a sack of flour and the simplest baked item, repeated. Cooking to 50 is a single sitting. Then make sweet dough from dough and honey and you have unlocked the entire cake-and-cookie branch of the menu.
Blank scrolls and a scribe's pen. Around 60 skill you can make a gargoyle book — 40 blank scrolls and 2 beeswax — and at 72 the bigger one for 4 wax. These are the recipes that make a beekeeper useful to the mages in the family.
Every trip anybody makes brings home junk. Donate all of it. 80,000 points sounds enormous and arrives faster than you'd think once the whole household is feeding the same bag.
Claim the hive, put it somewhere safe indoors, and lock it down so the bees appear. Secure it if you want only friends using it. From here it fills itself: ten jars every day and a half, forever, with no further input from you.
Cheap, cosy, and mostly one-time purchases. The only line with a real price isn't gold at all — it's the 80,000 clean-up points for the hive, and the whole family can chip in on those.
| What | Where | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Jars of honey | Beekeeper NPC — 3gp each | Until your hive arrives, this is your honey supply. There's a beekeeper in Buccaneer's Den and another in Trinsic over in Felucca. |
| Beeswax | Provisioner or innkeeper — 1gp | Buy it here, not from the beekeeper, who charges double for the identical item. Stock up: Inscription eats it a few at a time. |
| Blank scrolls, by the hundred | Mage shop, or scribe your own | A gargoyle book is 40 scrolls apiece. This is the bulk material of the Inscription half of the sheet. |
| A scribe's pen and a mortar and pestle | Mage shop or alchemist | One for Inscription, one for Alchemy. Both cheap, both last a long while. |
| Reagents in bulk | Mage shop | For the Alchemy and scroll-scribing. The only genuinely recurring cost you have. |
| An oven, and a house to put it in | House add-on deeds | The kitchen for the honey, and the floor your hive eventually gets locked down on. |
The right room makes training three times faster. These are the spots worth a rune.
The whole profession lives here. The hive must be locked down indoors for the bees to appear, and securing it keeps strangers out of your honey.
Our shard's Trammel beekeeper, at roughly 2659, 2194. Honey at 3gp, and the only bee shop on this side of the world.
The other beekeeper, around 1895, 2653. Same stock — but it's Felucca, so another player can kill you over three gold of honey. Go to Buccaneer's Den instead.
Where beeswax is cheapest, at a single gold. Also the in-game city guide lists BeeKeeper as a vendor type, so you can ask a townsperson to point you at one.
The visible swarm only appears when the hive is locked down in a house, and it disappears the moment you unlock it. A hive sitting loose on the floor still works, but it looks like a pot — and half the fun is the bees.
One jar every four hours, maximum ten stored. Once it's full the timer stops and you're wasting it. Forty hours is the whole cycle — collect roughly daily and you never lose a jar.
The Beekeeper NPC sells beeswax at 2gp. A provisioner or innkeeper sells the identical item at 1gp. Buy honey from the bee shop and wax from everybody else.
There's one in Trinsic in Felucca, where other players can kill you and take what you're carrying. The Buccaneer's Den beekeeper sells exactly the same thing in Trammel. There is no reason to make the dangerous trip.
Britannia runs on favours. These are the people you want in your party and on your friends list.