Minecraft wiki entry for Bee, associated text: If bees are given a flower, they enter love mode and pair up to create baby bees, granting the player 1-7 experience. The parent bees have a cooldown of 5 minutes (6000 ticks) before they can breed again. Babies take 20 minutes (1 in-game day) to grow up. The growth of baby bees can be accelerated using flowers; each use reduces the remaining time by 10%. However, bees' growth timer and breeding cooldowns are frozen while working in a hive; thus, when rapidly growing a population, it may be desirable to temporarily remove the hives.