Don’t Starve Together: How to Get Stinger

Stingers come off bees, and nothing else in the early game gives them up as reliably. A single Bee or Killer Bee drops one on death 83.3% of the time, which makes a beehive one of the most predictable resource nodes on the map once you know how to bait it.

Quick answer: Walk to a beehive, hit a nearby Bee with any weapon or tool until it dies, and pick up the Stinger it drops. Hitting the hive itself spawns more bees, so you can repeat this without hunting the map for stragglers.

A Stinger dropped by a defeated bee lying on the forest ground in Don't Starve Together — A Stinger on the ground after a bee is killed. Image: Klei Entertainment

Find a beehive on your map

Beehives are generated randomly during world creation, so there is no fixed location to memorize. Once you have walked past one, it stays marked on your map, and that marker is what you should be navigating back to whenever you need stingers.

Open the map to check what you have already uncovered. The game auto-pauses on the map screen in single-player worlds, so you can take your time reading the icons and planning a route.

The auto-paused world map with the player's position lit up in a small explored patch — The world map, auto-paused, showing the small area explored so far. Image: Klei Entertainment

If nothing useful is marked yet, explore outward in daylight. Hives sit out in the open, and you will usually hear and see loose bees circling before the hive itself comes into view.

Day 4 gameplay with the survivor walking through forest beside an evergreen, HUD visible — Scouting the forest on Day 4 with the inventory and status meters on screen. Image: Klei Entertainment

Kill a bee and pick up the Stinger

Equip anything that deals damage. A proper weapon is faster, but an Axe or any other tool already in your inventory works fine against a single bee.

Target one of the bees drifting near the hive and attack until it dies. Bees have very little health, so this is usually one or two swings.

Pick up the Stinger that drops. It goes straight into your inventory and stacks up to 40 per slot, so a full farming run takes almost no bag space.

The survivor swinging an axe at a bee, with the dropped Stinger ready to collect — Killing a bee with an axe and collecting the Stinger it leaves behind. Image: Klei Entertainment

Note: the moment you or any mob attacks a bee, the rest of that hive emerges as Killer Bees and every bee in range targets the attacker. That is fine when you want a stream of kills, and dangerous when you are low on health or wearing no armor.

Farm stingers faster by hitting the hive

Waiting for wild bees to wander past is slow. Striking the beehive directly forces it to release more bees at you, turning one structure into a repeatable spawner instead of a one-off encounter.

The survivor walking up to a beehive in the forest with the survival HUD on screen — Approaching a beehive, the structure that releases more bees when attacked. Image: Klei Entertainment

Two safer variations are worth keeping in mind. You can catch bees with a Bug Net and then murder them from your inventory, which produces the same drop without a fight. You can also let another mob do the killing for you and simply collect what falls on the ground.

A Bee Box behaves the same way as a wild hive here. Attack any of its bees and the rest come out as Killer Bees aimed at whoever swung first, so keep that in mind before farming next to your base.

Every Stinger source and drop rate

Source	Drop	Notes
Bee	83.3%	Standard hive bee, the main supply
Killer Bee	83.3%	What hive bees become once provoked
Bee Queen	×1 guaranteed	Boss drop
Grumble Bee	1%	Spawned during the Bee Queen fight
Tumbleweed	1% (×3)	Harvested while rolling

What stingers are used for in Don’t Starve Together

Knowing the recipes tells you how many stingers a trip actually needs. Boat repairs and darts eat them one at a time, while Dock Kits and Wickerbottom’s book demand a proper stack.

Recipe	Cost	Requirement
Sleep Dart	1 Stinger, 2 Cut Reeds, 1 Jet Feather	Science Machine
Booster Shot	1 Stinger, 2 Nitre, 8 Rot	Alchemy Engine
Boat Patch	1 Stinger, 2 Logs	—
Dock Kit (×4)	2 Stingers, 4 Boards, 1 Cut Stone, 1 Palmcone Scale	Rare blueprint
Stupefying Lure	1 Stinger, 1 Cookie Cutter Shell	Fishing blueprint
Nightshade Nostrum	1 Stinger, 3 Mourning Glory	Wendy only
Bramble Trap	1 Stinger, 1 Living Log	Wormwood only
Bramble Husk	4 Stingers, 2 Living Logs	Wormwood only
Shattering Rounds (20 Stinger Zingers)	2 Stingers	Walter only
Apicultural Notes	8 Stingers, 2 Papyrus, 4 Honey	Wickerbottom, Bookcase
Sewing Machine Kit	1 Stinger, 1 Gold Nugget, 2 Silk	Beefalo Shrine, Year of the Beefalo event

Storing and clearing spare stingers

Stingers dropped on the ground try to merge into a single stack, so a pile near your chest area stays tidy rather than littering the ground with individual items. Each stack holds up to 40.

If you end up with far more than you can spend, they can be set on fire and turned into Ashes. That is a reasonable way to clear surplus once your dart and boat supplies are already topped up.

Once a hive is marked on your map, treat it as a standing supply point. A short detour with a decent weapon and a Bug Net covers most of a season’s worth of darts, patches, and repair material without any real risk.