by NeoBasilisk » Sat Mar 12, 2016 11:18 pm
There are a lot of factors that go into wax production. As others said, there is an extremely low passive wax production rate. It is much faster to have crops growing around a beehive. But here is where it gets complex. Every time a crop grows to a new stage, it contributes towards the next piece of wax being produced in a bee skep. You might think that having a single hive with 400 crops around will produce twice as much wax as a hive with 200 crops around it, but this is not the case, because there is seemingly a cap on the amount of work a single hive can put towards a piece of wax in a given amount of time. There are figures for these details in guides and on the wiki, but I don't know how accurate they are. To further complicate things, crops like carrots and beetroots grow much faster than other crops, so they should help create wax more quickly than other crops because they mature faster, assuming that a single maturation tic is the same for all types of crops. Then there are some crops, like barley, that do not affect bee skeps at all.