Minecraft wiki entry for Honey_farming, associated text: Unfortunately, casually harvesting honey or honeycomb causes any bees inside the hive to emerge and attack the player who does it. If the player fights back with any attack, every bee in range joins the attack. Any time a bee succeeds in landing an attack, the player gets poisoned, and the bee itself dies about a minute later. Naturally, this is bad when you were hoping to adopt those bees, and worse when most of your own swarm commits suicide!