The Queen Bee is one of the heavier-hitting Bosses in Pre-Hardmode Terraria. A flying, fast-moving behemoth of bee is found in the underground Jungle.
Upon encountering a beehive in the underground Jungle, you can break a Larva found inside, summoning this optional boss.
She fires bees, stingers, and charges at you. Defeating her nets you many bee-related items and equipment.
If you’re feeling particularly like Winnie the Pooh, let’s get you ready for an encounter with a Queen Bee in this comprehensive Queen Bee Terraria guide.
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Need to Know
- Location: Jungle Biome Underground
- Enemy Type: Boss
- Pre-Hardmode: Yes
- Avoidable: Yes
- Difficulty: Medium
- Main Danger: Can summon by mistake, very aggressive, easily wipes low HP players.
Looks and Location
The Queen Bee looks as advertised, like a giant bee. However, she has a Gatling-Gun-looking tail end, which launches bees at the player when she isn’t moving.
Her yellow and black design style is very traditional. She tends to speed vertically across the screen, charging the player down.
You can summon the boss by mistake when digging underground in the Biome and coming across a beehive. Many beehives are placed randomly throughout the Jungle Biome when you generate a world. A Larva is often placed in the center of each.
Breaking the Larva for any reason will instantly summon the Queen Bee. If you weren’t prepared for the fight, the likelihood of you dying in your Pre-Hardmode gear is pretty high.
While she may not be a heavy hitter compared to the Hardmode enemies, she is arguably the most formidable Pre-Hardmode enemy. Her loot can make the Wall of Flesh Boss, the final Pre-Hardmode Boss, quite a pushover.
When looking for the Queen Bee, dig carefully under the Jungle Biome, hunt down some honeycomb blocks, and give yourself a good amount of space to battle the mother of bees.
Normal Mode 
Here are the quick stats for the Queen Bee on Normal Mode in Terraria. These are generally not different between modes, just a little boosted as the difficulty raises.
- Max Life: 3400
- Damage: 30(melee) 22 (Stinger)
- Defense: 8
- Knockback Resists: 100%
- Status Resist: Poison and Confusion
- Status Effects: Causes Poison
Strategy
The Queen Bee attacks by charging at you horizontally, and she is fast and takes up a good amount of space. After a few charges, she slows down and fires several bees at you as well as using her stinger attack to cause poison.
The Queen Bee generally only charges three times, so make sure you’ve dug out a good amount of space around the honeycomb so you can just grapple-hook up and drop down to avoid. What you want to avoid is the poison.
Being poisoned stops healing regen, so if you get poisoned from her stingers (all of her attacks in expert and master mode), you will need to make sure you’ve brought some potions. If you are protected from poison, take advantage of that honey regen bonus in the hive.
You want to do most of your damage when it summons bees against you. A good lightning rod you can pick up from the Tavern Keep placed near you can kill incoming bees while you do your most significant damage against her.
Although she can go through platforms, her stingers cannot, so if you put a door into a small room right near the hive entrance, you can run inside when she starts doing her stinger assault. This isn’t necessary if you’re doing a lot of damage. It’s better to just run left to the right and continue the assault.
You should be good to battle when you get into high-end armor of Pre-Hardmode, like the meteor or magma stuff. You can use the infinite laser from the meteorite or the hellwing bow and a good auto swing sword to farm the Queen Bee above ground for some of her best equipment. Using her weapons against her, such as The Bee’s Knees, is very effective.
Farming for the Sweet Stuff
Before entering Hardmode, I build a large platform on the surface of the Jungle Biome where I summon the Queen Bee and farm her for money and equipment drops. I suggest this for several reasons. Let’s look at the items that the Queen bee can drop.
BeeKeeper: A Sword that summons bees upon making contact with the enemy. 90% chance of confusion, making it useful even into Hardmode! Damage-26 with average knockback. 
The Bee’s Knees: A bow that turns any arrow used into a mini swarm of flying bees. Excellent early game DPS on this against large enemies due to the bees it launches. Damage-23 with very weak knockback. (does not benefit from higher arrow damage as of the 1.4 patches)
Bee Gun: A magic weapon with low mana use (5) and decent spread damage (9 per bee). Shooting 1-6 piercing bee projectiles at the enemy at a fast rate with no knockback.
All bees from these weapons dissipate in liquids and home in on enemies.
The other items it may drop
- Hive Wand: This Lets you place a hive around if you want to make your own.
- Bee Hat: Vanity head equipment
- Bee Shirt: Vanity body equipment
- Bee Pants: Vanity leg equipment
Honey Comb: A helpful accessory that covers you in honey(increasing regen speed) when struck and sends 1-3 bees to attack nearby enemies. It can be combined with multiple items.- Nectar: A pet slot item. A baby hornet.
- Honeyed Goggles: It is a great mount item for Pre-Hardmode as it gives you access to ‘flight’ without wings. Summons a giant wasp mount.
- Beenade(10-30): A grenade that lets out bees upon explosion.
- Queen Bee Mask: Vanity equipment
- Queen Bee Trophy: A furniture item that can be placed on a wall.
She will always drop these two things.
- Bee Wax(16-26): Used to craft the special summoner equipment: Bee Armor(30 for the full set) and the very useful Pre-Hardmode Summon, the Hornet Staff(14). If you are a summoner class, this is essential Pre-Hardmode equipment, or early Hardmode will be very difficult.
- Bottled Honey(5-15): A healing potion that restores 80 health.
- Gold Coins: x5
Expert Bee Hunting
If you like the Queen Bee equipment, you may want to brave Expert Mode and hunt down the more challenging version of the Queen Bee to get her “Goody Bag.”
Bee-ware, though, on Expert Mode, she charges faster, increases her defense as she loses health, and has more significant poison damage.
On Expert, the Queen drops the following accessory.
Hive Pack: Increases the number of bees summoned when equipped. Half of all friendly bees will appear as larger, more damaging versions. They will deal up to 1-4 extra damage fly faster. The stronger bees also deal 0.5 knockbacks (but it’s barely noticeable except in swarms or if the weapon you’re using has good knockback). They can also pierce 3 enemies (instead of 2) and last 1 second longer.
The Hive Pack affects the following items: Bee Keeper, The Bee’s Knees, Bee Gun, Beenades, the Honey Comb, or its related accessories. The Sweetheart Necklace, Bee Cloak, Honey Balloon, Amber Horseshoe Balloon, and the Stinger Necklace.
The Bees made from the Honey Comb or any of its upgraded accessories do not stack. So wearing a Bee Cloak and a Stinger Necklace will not trigger more than one set of bees.
Master Queen
On Master mode, she fights as she does on Expert. Her stats are almost doubled, and she drops two unique items.
- Sparkling Honey: A Pet summoning item of a giant wasp.
- Queen Bee Relic: A cool golden statue of the Queen Bee boss. Her likeness hovers over its platform.
Tricky Queen Tactics
The Queen Bee has the most significant number of drops of any Boss in Pre-Hardmode, second-most in all the game. So, once you are comfortable fighting her, it’s a good idea to farm her multiple times to rack up plenty of money and make sure you’ve got some of the rare drops and good equipment. Her weapons specifically can crush the Wall of Flesh.
That sword as well, though it isn’t a fast killer, the Bee Keeper confuses a lot of enemies. Since Hardmode can turn underground Biomes into Hallow or Corruption right away, this sword can save you on the trip up. It can even let you farm some items that would otherwise be difficult due to your armor level in early Hardmode.
Set a bed in the jungle biome above a safe platform about midway towards the sky. Then teleport to it as soon as you break a Larva and see the Queen Bee. This is a solid strategy.
You can craft the Abeemination, which is used to summon the Queen Bee by hand to farm her.
Abeemination: Honey Block (5)Stinger(1) Hive (5) Bottled Honey (1), by hand.
Trivia
- Queen Bee is the only boss that cannot be fought an infinite number of times per world. The Larva spawned, and the honey blocks are limited, even if seemingly plentiful.
- That does not count in Journey Mode. You can also enter a world seed to ignore this called: celebrationmk10.
- The Jungle Mimic in that seed may drop a “stuff cannon,” which can randomly spawn honey blocks for crafting the Abeemination.
- The Queen Bee is one of the few bosses that get her exclusive music.
- The Queen Bee’s original sprite concept looks vastly different, much more resembling that of a giant hornet.
- When you run from the Queen Bee too far, she will enter charge mode to catch you.
- I once died accidentally to Queen Bee with my Medium Core character(which drops all your stuff when you die) and spawned at the Ocean Biome just a few hundred blocks from the fight. Upon waking, she charged into me, and I was stuck in a death loop for what felt like infinite minutes when I managed to un-click the spawn point. Fun stuff.
- The Queen Bee’s Bestiary entry reads: “This highly aggressive monstrosity responds violently when her larva is disturbed; the honey-laden hives are her home turf.”
A Bee Hive can, ‘very rarely,’ be large enough to possess 2 Larvae, do not make the mistake of breaking both of them.
FAQs
Question: Does the Queen Bee drop a Yelets?
Answer: Yes, the Queen Bee can drop a Yelets if you’ve killed her after having also killed a Mechanical Boss.
Question: Is the Queen Bee hard?
Answer: Every boss in Terraria is potentially hard. The curve from one to the next is based solely on how much you prepare after it killed you the first time or if you’ve read up on a Guide like this one to help you.
Question: What’s the best weapon for killing the Queen Bee?
Answer: Because it’s flying, I would suggest anything with high damage projectiles and fast DPS or a good Yoyo and a yoyo glove. She can be damaged by On Fire! Frostburn, Cursed Flame, and Ichor. So take advantage of that when farming.
Question: Why did the Queen Bee despawn?
Answer: She despawns on multiplayer when both players die. That could be one reason. Another is when you leave the Jungle Biome too quickly upon spawning her, she may occasionally despawn. It should be fixed in current patches; however, it’s still plausible.
Or if you broke two Larvae too close together, this could cause a despawning of the one you were fighting and summon a new fully powered Queen Bee.
Good Gaming
Queen Bee is a challenging but cool boss who drops some fun and useful items. She is easy to summon by chance or on purpose. So, it is wise to be careful of her until you’re doing quite well with weapons and armor in later Pre-Hardmode as opposed to trying to take her on in very early runs.
A good design as usual and great for gaining money. Queen Bee is a very memorable addition to the Terraria Boss family and one we here are happy to have had the pleasure of getting killed by. I mean taking down.
Embark on a boundless adventure in the pixelated sandbox world of Terraria, where you can dig, build, and explore to your heart's content. With endless possibilities for creativity and discovery, join millions of players in crafting your own epic journey.
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