What can you do with honey in Minecraft (2022) 

Honey is a unique material in Minecraft, only attainable by farming beehives. Players can obtain it by using a glass bottle on a beehive at honey level five.

This is represented by drips of honey falling out of the hive, which will reset the hive to honey level zero. This limitation of farming means inherently that players who haven’t interacted with bees won’t know much about the purpose of honey.

However, honey has a plethora of uses, many of which are unique to the material itself, or just a handful of items in the entire game, meaning knowledge of and access to it is quite important.

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Honey and its uses in Minecraft in 2022

Food

A player crafting a honey bottle into sugar (Image via Minecraft)

Eaten outright

Bottles of honey harvested from bee nests or hives can be eaten outright. Doing so will restore six hunger, represented in-game by three of the hunger icons.

Eating honey will cure the poison status effect if gamers currently suffer from it.

Crafted into sugar

If players place a bottle of honey into Minecraft's crafting grids, it can be turned into three sugar. This destroys the bottle, so the process is not reversible.

It also means that an adequately sized bee farm can replace a sugar cane farm for food purposes and still allow users to craft things like cake and pumpkin pie.

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Honey blocks

A player turning a honey block back into a bottle of honey (Image via Minecraft)

Four bottles of honey can be placed into the crafting grid to create a block of honey. This returns the bottles to the player’s inventory, and the empty bottle can be put into a grid with a block of honey to return the honey to liquid, bottled form.

This is one of Minecraft's most reversible crafting recipes, which adds to the uniqueness of honey as a whole.

Fall protection

Honey blocks function identically to hay bales when reducing fall damage. This means that any fall damage the player suffers is reduced by 80%. For example, a fall from a height that would cause 10 damage, or five hearts of damage, would instead only deal two damage, or one heart of damage.

Sliding down

A player sliding down a great height using honey blocks (Image via Minecraft)

Entities that press against the side of a honey block will slide down at a slow speed and will not take any fall damage. This is like using a ladder, however, there is gradually decreasing horizontal momentum, meaning players cannot go very far to the side while sliding down.

This signifies that players can jump two blocks further by holding onto honey block walls.

This slowdown effect also stacks with the slow falling status effect.

Slowing entities

Any entity walking on honey blocks is slowed and prevented from jumping. This reduction is about 60% in normal walking speed. In addition, the player’s jump height is reduced by about 85%.

Any blocks that are less than half a block tall will continue to apply this slowing and jump reduction effect. For example, carpets, bottom slabs, and daylight detectors will continue to apply these effects.

Redstone

A piston moving a honey block connected to other blocks (Image via Minecraft)

When pushing a honey block with a piston, any entity on top of the block will move with it. This does not launch an entity like a slime block would do. When a honey block is pushed with a piston, any blocks connected to the honey block also move. This is like slime blocks, however, unlike slime blocks, honey blocks cannot carry a redstone signal.

Honey blocks cannot be pulled by a sticky piston, nor will a honey block be moved by a non-honey block connected to the honey block being moved by a piston. The piston push limit of 12 blocks still applies to honey blocks.