click or drag to draw · shift+drag to rub out · right click to drop a bee · space to pause
on a touch screen: drag a finger to draw, and hold it still for a moment to drop a bee
pick a shape from the list and every click stamps one down. try a glider gun on one side and a pulsar in its path.

two bees cannot stand on the same square, so a crowded corner of the board runs out of room and stops breeding all by itself. only a bee eater may step onto another bee, which is exactly how it eats one.
bees eat the red squares. one square is one meal, and eating it takes the whole thing - so two hungry bees cannot share. a square nobody eats fades from bright red through two darker shades and is gone. go too long without food and they starve (they go orange when they are getting desperate). a cell coming alive underneath one squashes it.
a bee that starves leaves a living cell behind where it fell.
eat enough meals and a bee has a litter: two babies for a careful or a wandering one, three for a bold one, and one at a time for an alpha or a builder (though a builder's one baby arrives with four crew mates). they are born on the free squares next door, so a bee hemmed in has as many as there is room for - and a bee already shoulder to shoulder with the swarm does not breed at all, which is what keeps the board from filling up entirely. each baby is the same sort of bee as its parent - except one time in twenty, when it comes out an alpha. an alpha's baby goes the other way one time in five, and comes out an ordinary sort of bee instead. it copies its parent's stats, but each stat wobbles up or down by as much as 2 - so the bees slowly change. the sliders set the stats of brand new bees only; bees already out there keep their own.
every bee is born with one of three strategies, picked at random: ● careful (knows the one rule of the game and will not stand on a square that is about to come alive, and keeps well away from living cells besides. two babies at a time, and each litter costs it half a meal more than the last one - so it is never numerous, but it lives far longer than anything else out there. it is the only one that can hide from a bee eater: hold absolutely still and the eater goes straight past. it can only do that while it has food to spare - once it is half way to starving it has to move, and moving gives it away)   ■ bold (heads straight for the food, leaps two squares at a time, and has the biggest litters at three. aggressive, but not daft: it barely minds living cells, yet it knows the one rule of the game - an empty square with exactly three living neighbours comes alive next go - and will not stand on one, not even to eat. going two squares at a time, it nearly always has somewhere better to be)   ▲ wanderer (mooches about, only heads for food one go in three, two babies at a time, but lasts twice as long without eating - and when it does starve it leaves a splat of cells behind and four children standing in it. squashed is how a wanderer nearly always dies, and even then it leaves one child behind where it fell - so a wanderer dying is really a changing of the guard, and dying is very much what it is for)   ◆ alpha (purple, and rarer still. same stats as everyone else - it just works out what the board will do next go before it steps. each baby it has means one more red square to eat before the next one, and it has two powers: the leap - it can cross up to 5 squares in one go, but every square costs it double food, so a full length leap costs 10 · the shot - when a bee eater comes within 2 squares it can lay a trail of 3 living cells nearby, crushing any bee eater standing on it. that leaves the alpha just 5 goes from starving, so it is a last resort)   ✚ builder (teal, and always in a pair - builders are born two at a time, and belong to nobody until five of them find each other and team up. a loose builder goes looking for the others, and eats on the way if it has to. five is the number because a glider is five squares. they last three times as long as anyone else without food, and they do not hunt for it: every go the crew picks a clear patch of board between them, gives each builder one square of it, and each builder lays a living cell on its square from the square next door. when all five are down the glider crawls away and drops food behind it forever, and the crew eats off it while it marks out the next one. lose one and the rest go their separate ways, looking for a new crew)
▉ the plague - rare, and not a bee at all. it is a dark green body made of blocks, and it crawls by picking up half of itself - rounding up - and putting it down again on the far side, which is how a big one covers ground so quickly. it eats living cells and it eats bees, and every second thing it eats it grows another block. it gets hungrier just by being there, and a big body burns far more than a small one - a single block can wait a very long time for something to turn up, while a big one has only a few goes in it unless it keeps eating. when it does starve it goes all at once, and the whole body is left behind as living cells. the hungrier it gets the more of itself it throws forward - half of it when it is comfortable, seven tenths when it is desperate - so a starving one is the fastest thing on the board. bees keep well away. a bee eater will bite a block clean out of one - and if that cuts it in two, the smaller piece dies where it lies and turns into living cells.
⬤ bee eater - one time in twenty, a bee that starves leaves one of these behind instead of a plain living cell. any sort of bee can do it. it has no tricks: it is just a big aggressive blue bee that eats bees. it eats bees and nothing else - red squares are no use to it - and has a baby every single time it eats. it also burns food five times faster than a bee, so if it is not catching bees it starves in no time at all. a careful bee can hide from one by holding absolutely still, but nobody else can, so the rest keep well away from them - and an alpha shoots back.