I can easily make the 3d model, and can animate it in Blender without a problem (hopefully), however I can't find a tutorial on how to make an animated nif for oblivion in Blender. Character anims etc are in abundance, but not animated statics. Does anyone know where to start? I want to create a bee, or indeed several of them, flying over the grass etc and amongst flowers.

Can't you just take the butterfly or firefly texture and replace it with your bee texture? We have a lot of custom creatures in Black Marsh where our creatures are just reskinned vanilla creatures, literally. So the mesh is just the original with a new texture. I would think the fireflies would work just fine.

Failing that, SaidenStorm has some https://sites.google.com/site/saidenstorm/stormfrontstudiostutorials for Max, but I don't know of any for Blender.