Minecraft wiki entry for Honey_farming, associated text: Once you've built up a few productive hives, the most likely disaster is accidentally aggravating your bees — never mind the hazard to you, but every bee that stings successfully will die, which can wipe out whole hives. If you can't quickly escape to someplace where the bees can't follow you, the best option might be to just stand there and let the bees get it over with quickly, and wait out the bee's deaths. Just eat enough food so the sting damage won't kill you -- the poison damage can't kill you by itself, and if you already have a honey bottle you can cure it anyway. After you've waited out the bees' deaths, grab some spare flowers and keep waiting a bit longer — if you're lucky, a few of your bees may have been busy inside their hives for the duration of the attack, so you can breed them to re-fill the newly-emptied hives. As above, keeping backup hives safely in a chest can also help with this situation.