The Hornet Staff is a summoning weapon you can get in the early game. You just need to defeat Queen Bee to be able to craft it.

The Hornet Staff spawns a Hornet minion that follows the player and attacks enemies with an attack similar to the Hornet enemy’s attack. The minion throws a ranged non-piercing sting traveling a straight line and inflicting the Poisoned debuff on hit for 4-7 seconds.

The Hornet minion is invincible and will follow you until you die, cancel the buff, summon another minion, or leave the world.

The best modifier for this weapon is Ruthless. Maybe you think Mythical can be better, but its bonus stats affect the initial summon rather than the resulting Hornet minion. It’s just better to use the Mythical modifier if you want your minion to inflict a bigger knockback.

How to get the Hornet Staff

The only way to get the Hornet Staff is to craft it. You can craft it using 14 Bee Waxes at an anvil. You drop Bee Waxes on the Queen Bee.

The Queen Bee

The Queen Bee is a pre-hardmode boss. She is summoned when you break Larvas inside Bee Hives in the Underground Jungle. You can also summon her using an Abeemination anywhere in the Jungle. Be careful when you’re in a hive because if you damage the Larvas, no matter the item you use, they will break and the Queen Bee will be summoned. For example, projectiles can break the larvas. It means that if there are two Larvas in a hive, eventually the first Queen Bee summoned will break the second Larva, summoning a second Queen Bee.

If you try to fight the Queen Bee outside the Underground Jungle, she will enter an enraged state. If you fight her in the Jungle, she will still be enraged, but less than if you fight her in another biome such as the Desert.

The Queen Bee attacks are very basic. The first is just an attack similar to the one of the Hornet, she throws a poisoned dart dealing damage. The second is a charge attack: she will line up with the player and charge toward him. The last one is a static attack: the Queen Bee stops moving for some time and summons Bees.

The fight isn’t very hard, so it allows you to quickly drop Bee Waxes to craft your Hornet Staff. In addition, if you defeat the Queen Bee, you will have a chance to get other powerful items including for example the Bee Keeper (a powerful sword summoning bees when you hit enemies) or the Bee Gun (a magic weapon summoning bees chasing enemies).

Tips to defeat the Queen Bee

• Clear the arena. In Bee Hives, there is a lot of honey on the floor. Just remove it using blocks or even buckets if you want because honey will slow you down and make it harder to dodge Queen Bee attacks. You can just let some honey because when you walk in it you’re granted a buff increasing life regeneration.
• Bees don’t do a lot of damage but they’re annoying anyway because they can push you. A good accessory to equip to defeat the Queen Bee easily can be something like the Cobalt Shield as it allows you to don’t take any knockback from the bees.
• Using a Shield of Cthulhu at the right time, you can block the Queen Bee’s charge attack.

For more guides or tutorials, be sure to see our other articles as TERRARIA: HOW TO USE THE FAVORITE ITEMS FEATURE? or TERRARIA: TOP 7 BEST HOUSE IDEAS.