Hibeescus

“The colors clearly suggest they're venomous, and pretty.”

–Wilson

Hibeescus are a variant of Bees found in the Cherry Forest. They live in Beehives infected by an Ivyscus.

Players can manually infect their Bee Boxes by planting flowers of the Cherry Forest around them, bees pollinating these flowers will be immediately infected and grow the Ivyscus on their hive which will now spawn Hibeescus instead and allow collection of Bloomy Honey.

Due to their mossy body, all types of Hibeescus are twice more vulnerable to fire damage.

Behavior

Hibeescus are neutral Mobs and will act as classic Bees at the difference that they won't turn hostile during Spring. However they tend to attack normal Bees who get too close and fight to death without looting anything from both sides, making it difficult to keep both types of bees and flowers in the same area.

They apply poison when successfully attacking a non-insect target and loose their stinger after applying it, preventing them from attacking again and will die overtime. Players wearing a Beekeeper Hat will prevent both poison and stinger loss.

Poison

Hibees poison is applied by Hibeescus, Bloomble Bees and the Hibees Queen. Each of them apply a different amount of poison stacks (1, 2 and 3 respectively) to the target if it isn't already poisoned.

While the target is poisoned, only half of the stacks will be added to the previous amount from new poisonous attacks (+0.5, +1 and +1.5).

The poison has a base duration of 10 seconds. Each time a new stack of poison is applied, 20% of the remaining time is added, extending the poison duration.

Each stack of poison deals 1 damage every 0.5 second to players, or double to other mobs. Insects and structures are immune to Hibees poison. Walter takes x1.5 more damage from the stacks and Wormwood takes twice as less.

The poison can be cured by eating Bloomy Honey or Bloomy Taffy, which both reduce the amount of poison stacks by 5 and 15 respectively.

Hunting

Hibeescus can be captured with Bug Nets to be murdered in the inventory or attacked with the same pattern as bees, triggering a riposte from the rest of the hive in both scenarios which can cause significant damage due to their poisonous nature if not dealt with a lot more precaution.

Wearing Beekeeper Hats or negating the whole damage of an attack with the help of the Bone Armor or such will prevent incoming poison, so these items are to be considered while dealing with Hibeescus.

They can be quickly dealt with by the help of Torches or other fire damage sources since Hibeescus take double damage while standing or covered in fire. Their Ivyscus also burns relatively fast compared to hives or anything else, making it easy to cleanse honey farms from Hibeescus infection by burning them and extinguishing the rest, however, the same result can be achieved by using a Razor but this will release a last swarm to attack the player, possibly infecting the hive or bee box back if they aren't all killed immediately of beforehand.

Below is the number of hits it takes with each weapon to kill a Hibeescus when playing with characters with a default damage modifier. The Weather Pain and Mimic Darts are not included due to the random nature of their projectile.