The worker bees live inside the blockchain and act as virtual mining rigs. Worker bees have extremely low energy cost, so bee keepers (Hive miners) do not require any special hardware to mine blocks.
There is a tab in LCC core wallet titled as “The Hive”. This shows a table of bee keeper’s current and expired (dead) bees. For each bee, it shows creation date, time to mature or time left to expire, bee cost and mining results. The “Create Bees” interface is also placed in this tab.
When a bee keeper creates worker bees he sends the bee price (0.05 LCC per bee) to a special unspendable address. All bee keepers send the bee price to the same address. A bee keeper can create as many bees as he likes in one swarm, but note that funds spent to create bees are destroyed (lost forever).
When a swarm (bunch of bees) is created, the wallet generates a legacy address to receive the block rewards. This occurs each time a swarm is created. Whenever that swarm will mine a block, the rewards (block subsidy and transaction fee) will go to that address. Block subsidy is the amount that miners claim as a reward for creating a block, currently at 125 LCC. If the bee keeper wishes to receive all rewards from each swarm in a single legacy address, then he must create bees using “Console” window.
The bee keeper has an option to send 10% of bee price to the community fund that will use to cover the development costs of the project. The bee keeper will still receive the same amount of bees irrespective of this choice.
For example:
A bee keeper wishes to create 2000 bees.
This will cost 100 LCC (2000 x 0.05). The 100 LCC is sent to an unspendable address, effectively destroying all of the coins. The bee keeper may choose to send 10 LCC (100 x 10%) of this amount to the community fund or may destroy all 100 LCC by not sending to the community fund. In both cases the bee keeper will receive 2000 bees, with 100 LCC plus transaction fee deducted from the account balance.
Once the bee keeper has created bees and the transaction has appeared in a block, bees will be displayed in “Your Hive” section. Worker bees take 1152 blocks (Approx. 1 day 9 hours 43 minutes) to mature. During this time the wallet does not need to be online. When matured, bees will attempt to produce a new hivemined block every time they observe a new incoming proof of work (PoW) block. This mining attempt takes only a fraction of a second even for a large swarm and does not cause any lag or lock-up of computer.
The lifespan of bees is 16,128 blocks (Approx. 19 days and 16 hours). When the bees are alive (mature and working within the blockchain) the bee keeper needs to keep the wallet online as much as possible. Bees can only work when the wallet is connected to the network. If the wallet is offline during the working lifespan of bees they will be unable to mine blocks but their lifespan will still decrease.
At the bottom-right of the wallet, there is a hexagonal Hive status icon (second from right). A Green indication shows that bees are mature and working. For any other color please hover the mouse pointer on the icon for additional info.
Before creating bees bee keeper must check the Global Index (GI). If Global Index is below 100 it means bees are expected to be profitable. And if Global Index is above 100 it means bees are not expected to be profitable.
Note: It is not recommended to purchase bees when Global Index is at or above 100.
For example:
Global Index = 115.16. If you invest 115.16 LCC, the probability of ROI (Return on Investment) is 100 LCC and you will lose 15.16 LCC.
Global Index = 90. If you invest 90 LCC, the probability of ROI is 100 LCC.
The mining probability also depends on some other factors, e.g. system speed, performance and stability of internet connection, how many bees are online or offline from other bee keepers.
Here is a video on how to create bees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5y0_E9r06M