Minecraft wiki entry for Honey_farming, associated text: The design also has one non-obvious failure state — if a hive becomes full and the dispenser has run out of bottles, even after being resupplied it does not harvest the hive. The solution here is to break and replace a piece of redstone dust on the hive's top-layer trail. This interrupts the comparator's signal and allows the dispenser to trigger on the full hive.