My First Beehive

A hive on your desk, painted in acrylic

My First Beehive is an idle beekeeping game built to sit beside your work. One glass-fronted observation hive, three frames of comb, and a garden out the back door. You look in when you like. The bees get on with it either way.

A real year, at a gentle pace

The colony follows the seasons of a Northern Virginia garden. A season is a week of your time. In spring the queen fills the comb with brood and the first honey arches over the top; in summer the foragers work the tulip poplar and the wildflowers; in fall the goldenrod comes in and the cluster draws together for winter. Leave for a fortnight and come back to the fortnight you missed, written in the journal.

Everything on the comb is a bee doing something

Watch a worker chew her way out of her cell and walk off pale. Find the queen - she is half again as long as the others, and she keeps to the brood. Put the magnifying glass on any cell and it tells you what is in it: an egg, a larva, capped honey, packed pollen. Foragers come home through the tube with pollen on their legs, the colour of whatever is flowering.

Keep them, or just watch

There are only a few things to do, and none of them is a chore. Harvest when there is honey to spare. Feed them if the stores run low. Treat for mites in the fall. Skip all of it and the hive is still there next spring, a little smaller. Nothing dies - a season you sit out costs you honey, and never the colony.

Sell the honey. Spend it on the garden.

Your honey is money. Every jar goes in the journal named for the flow it came from, and then you sell it and decide what it buys: another bed of flowers, the mite treatment that keeps the colony strong through the fall, or a tree - the expensive thing, bought perhaps once a year, that arrives as a sapling and takes seasons to fill out.
And the garden pays you back. What is in bloom when the bees fly decides how much honey you get and what kind it is, so a bed planted this spring is next summer's harvest. A thin first year buys one more thing. A garden you have kept for years is a different hive altogether.

A garden that moves

Plant beds of coneflower, daisy, bee balm and black-eyed Susan, and the bees fly out to them. One breeze crosses the whole garden and every flower leans with it. Birds sing from the trees. It is always mid-afternoon. Where you put things is close to permanent, so the garden becomes a record of every choice you made.

Painted, not rendered

Every comb cell, every flower and every bee is a painting in acrylic, composited and moved by code. It looks like a picture because it is one.

What is in the hive today

• One observation hive, three frames, seen one at a time - lean in to the cells.
  
• A real 364-day year at one season a week; it catches up on the time you were away.
  
• The queen, the brood, the honey and the pollen, laid down the way a colony lays them.
  
• A honey journal written in a real hand: a page a fortnight, every jar named for its flow.
  
• Four things to do and no chores: harvest, feed, treat, check the stores. Skipping them costs honey, never the colony.
  
• A real economy: sell your honey and spend it on flowers, on beekeeping supplies, and on trees that arrive as saplings and grow for years.
  
• A garden that decides your harvest - what is flowering when the bees fly sets how much honey you get, and what kind.
  
• Idle by design: it runs in a small window while you do something else.