Hi all... been a while since my last topic I've forgot how I used to greet everyone. 
erm - anyway. hello ~
Something was brought to my attention since the last update and found myself thinking about it a lot already so maybe I should share that, I also have a couple of questions to highlight player preferences on simple farming structures, I'm a little curious about this.
Okay now for the intro... I swear I'll keep it short for once.
Farms for crops have been recently reworked and now there's a little more thoughts put into farming in general, I think it's great but I'm not gonna repeat what have been said for months now and jump into what I wanted to say :
It's about the rest of the farming aspects of the game, food you usually obtain by player made buildings and such, like Bee Boxes. There's more of them but I don't have much to say about them atm like Mushrooms Planters, relocatable plants and misc food productions like Lureplants and Barnacles... maybe I'll have some worlds to put on them another time but I'm okay with most of them... most but not all.
All these things offer unique food sources but share a pretty similar process in term of generating the items, some require items to be but in, but in general it's just you place them where you want and wait once the setup is ready. Players doesn't have much to do to make things work efficiently plus the process is often surprisingly fast.
Today I'm looking to imagine some mechanism enhancements for one of these building : the Bee Box and ask you if you'd be ready for heavy changes like a focused update on such things (like RWYS). The questions have few options, I want to have a clear idea of your opinions but if you have something additional to mention then I'm all hear. 
What Bee Boxes do and honey farming (as now) :
So to get the best out of Honey you have to destroy all the hives in your world and use the Honey Combs in the Crock- wait no, wrong topic !
Hmm... well the best if not just the only viable source of honey is from the Bee Boxes, and overall it's a great food item just itself but also a strong Crock Pot filler / ingredient for key recipes, it's definitely something you look for during the first year. Being a Beekeeper is kind of an exiting hobby IRL that I doesn't had the chance to perform yet but DST gives us a chance to do it here so that's nice. But the fun of it have noticeably big limits !
Good thing that I have some ideas, eh ?
First thing, Bee Boxes and Honey is 99% of what I was saying in intro, you build the setup which can be done very quickly with the boxes and flowers around, a little Flingomatic to avoid whoopsie situations during summer and you're good forever. Now the little percent left is about what bees can do rest of the time, which could be much better if it was more noticeable and useful : Bees can grow new flowers by themselves, it's interesting cause it depend of the flower type you plant, so if it's an Evil Flower, you get more of that, but problem, there's only 2 flower types that can be used, and the difference is not important except if you want to loose some sanity when you're around your box and get 1 extra Nightmare Fuel per season.
(you can actually get a bigger production if the bees are homeless... but it's not that effective)
So that's what you get, could it be upgraded ? 
Bee Box interactions with flowers and players (concept) :
Why mentioning all that stuff with flowers ? Well what if there was a flower rework that would allow bees do different things from new flower types ?
Think of it, the nectar bees get out of a flower can make unique flavours, so the honey produced could be a different one on some kind of flowers with various stats and attributes or unique recipes, while some other kinds have effects on the bees to boost their production, speed, honey limit... seriously there's a swarm of potential here ! 
If bees use standard flowers or various sort of flowers at once, the honey would be classic, but special honeys could have an unique appearance on the Bee Box and the item could be displayed a bit like previous seed system, if not just new wacky names like the new seeds when you haven't researched their plants yet like "Super Sticky Honey", "Zesty Flavoured Honey"... I'm more a fan of the second concept especially if that involves new gardening entries for a codex...
But that could also look the old seed way : 
And of course... more flowers also means decorating, but wouldn't that require some unique butterflies to transport them ? Anyway we're here for bees...
There's also a bunch of tools that Beekeepers can use that would be a nice addition to the game... here I'm doing some self-promotion but I've made a Bee Smoker on a mod, and it can be used to calm bees so they don't attack the harvester, this completely out stand the Beekeeper Hat but if it requires a specific cost-y fuel to use, I guess it would make a great upgrade to the players than doing the huge dodge to loose aggro from bees every time :
But would that be enough to make Bee Boxes more... playing involving and fun ? Not at all, so far what we visited for a potential rework of flowers and honey only adds diversity but player involvement is also an important part to a good and effective farming process without making it tedious... 
Disease flashbacks...
Talking of tediousness, bees work very hard all day so maybe the player could lend a hand and help in the bee workplace :
I think that's how beekeeping could be a better activity in game, the bees aren't exposed to much hazards while we're in a complete hostile world (apparently), so what about seasonal little jobs you could do to help bee from threats like wild weeds and perfidious bugs ! Eventually this could require to lower the default honey production rate, I'm not sure of this but I expect the effort/reward of honey production to scale properly. At least, a good beekeeper would be properly paid with honey without wasting time, doing that once per season at least would give you a decent production for a moment.
I'm well aware that some parts of the rework idea require to remake the entire system on how the pollination and harvesting of honey work on bees and box but what it takes to make something great ! and for trying myself to do something like such on mods for quite a while now I can say it was not too much of a challenge to do.
Well that's about it for now ! I could develop ideas for Bee Boxes much more but this was just to show a scenario on how I'd like things to look for a farming building instead of using the traditional : Do this > Get that, system of the game, or at least give it additional steps... I believe it look more both beneficial for multiplayer roles and realistic, the realism of the game is not an important criteria but skipping too many key points of a normal behaviour in nature can often make things a little boring. So I hope you enjoyed the read and maybe got some ideas I'd like you to tell me about, until then, have a good one. 