Buzzed: An Idle Beekeeping GameBuzzed: An Idle Beekeeping Game

A meadow in the corner of your screen

Buzzed is not a game you switch to. It is a small transparent window that sits on your desktop — no border, no sky, always on top, docked to whichever corner you like — with a few painted hives, some grass, and bees going about their work in front of whatever you are actually doing.



Look over when you feel like it. Harvest a full hive, plant something, check on a queen. Then go back to work. It will keep going without you.

The bees are real bees

Most idle games about bees are about numbers wearing a bee costume. This one did the reading.

• Varroa mites breed on a doubling clock and are counted the way beekeepers count them — mites per 100 bees, against the real economic threshold of three. Test with a sugar roll or an alcohol wash. Treat with oxalic, formic or thymol, each with the catch it has in life.
  
• Let the count climb and the viruses it carries break out on their own.
  
• American and European foulbrood, nosemosis, chalkbrood, wax moth, small hive beetle, deformed wing virus, and robbing — each on its own pace, from a nuisance that takes two hours to matter to one that empties a hive while you watch.
  
• Disease drifts between neighbouring hives, so where you put things matters.
  
• Some of it is contagious, some of it is terminal, and one of your seventeen options is burning the box. That is not a punishment. That is beekeeping.
  
• Queens age, lay worse, and eventually fail. A hive without a queen is on a fuse, and if you leave it long enough the workers start laying — badly.
  

Winter is the reset

The meadow runs a twelve-hour year, and the clock only moves while the meadow is open — shut the game for a week and you come back to the week you left. When the year turns, your colonies eat whatever honey is still in the box to get through, so autumn is a real decision made with the harvest button, not a cutscene. The woodware survives. The colony starts again.



What you carry forward is royal jelly, earned by the colonies that made it, and it buys four permanent tracks: spring vigour, rich forage, hardy stock, and long-lived queens.

Things to do while you are not looking

• Thirty-two species of bee to find and unlock in a bee-dex, from the western honey bee to Wallace's giant bee — each with its real name attached.
  
• A market street — a cooper for jars and casks, a seed stall, a timber yard for boxes, paint and land, a confectioner, a bank that grades your honey and pays by the grade, a task board where named buyers want a named blend, and an old beekeeper on a bench who will tell you things.
  
• Beeswax and mead — every harvest leaves cappings on the shelf, and honey held back in an oak cask comes out of the bank's cellar as something worth more than it went in.
  
• Land that grows — buy the next plot and the window itself widens along the bottom of your screen, until it doesn't, and the meadow starts scrolling instead.
  
• A paint shed where every hive box, roof and nameplate is yours to do up. Purely cosmetic. Entirely the point.
  
• Clover, daisies and lavender to plant wherever you want them, that bees actually fly to.
  
• The honey show, once a year at the end of autumn, where the street puts a table out and the parson, the miller's girl and the old beekeeper each bring a jar. Enter yours. Best in show is a rosette and a purse.
  
• A royal warrant pinned to the task board from the first day — five things the crown wants to see before it will place an order, and a crest for your gable when you fill it. That is the summit. It is a long way off.
  
• Twenty-two things to have done — the first jar, a proper row of five, a blend graded prize, five winters. Including the one nobody escapes: losing a colony.
  
• 105 bee facts, one on the title card every time you launch.
  

It runs on your clock

Dusk in the meadow is dusk outside your window. The bees head in when the light goes and the fireflies come out. The moon shows the phase the real one is in tonight. Close the game for three days and you come back to hives that filled while you were gone — no summary card, no ceremony. The fuller boxes are the summary, and finding them yourself is the whole pleasure of coming back.

Quiet by design

Everything is hand-drawn pixel art on a single grid. Seven small tunes that come and go with long rests between them, and real bees recorded at a hive in the south of France — both switchable, independently, because a thing that sits on your desktop all day should be able to shut up. It floats over your other windows until you would rather it did not, sits in whichever corner you tell it to, and will run at fifteen frames a second if you are on a train and would rather keep the battery. There is no timer pressuring you, no punishment for leaving, and nothing that needs you right now.