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.

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 ten, 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 (keeps well away from living cells, two babies at a time, but each litter costs it half a meal more than the last one)   ■ bold (heads straight for the food, leaps two squares at a time, and has the biggest litters at three)   ▲ 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)   ◆ 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 never on its own - builders come in crews of five, one for each square of a glider. 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)
⬤ 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. there is no hiding from one by keeping still, so bees keep well away from them - and an alpha shoots back.