The Bee's Knees

This site offers an online worldwide game whose purpose is to entertain while raising money to fight the viral contamination of native bee populations in the US and UK, if not everywhere.

Game play consists of joining a community of bees whose role in life is to pollinate flowers, to bring pollen to their hive, and to mate with the queen of the hive to propagate the community. Your drone competes against the other drones of the meadow to complete its mission first: to reach the queen to be her mate.

Each of your moves costs a few satoshis — less than pennies. The money raised from all players collects in a honey pot. At the end of the game, 80% of the pot is paid to the current pollinator conservation society chosen for support. 10% is awarded to the winning bee. The remainder is retained to help the Tollbooth DPYC community offer this gamified charitable service.

Turn to the About page to read more on game strategy and on the technology used to build the game. But, first, read on to learn about why this game matters.

📉 The Current Pollinator Crisis

Beekeepers in the United States have been losing a large share of their colonies every year for the better part of two decades. National surveys put the annual figure between roughly 29 and 51 percent depending on the year, averaging near 40. British beekeepers report overwinter losses too, typically smaller but still far above what was once normal.

The largest single cause is not mysterious. It is a parasitic mite, Varroa destructor, which reached the United States in the late 1980s and is now effectively everywhere. It feeds on developing bees and carries viruses — deformed wing virus above all — that a healthy colony would otherwise shrug off. A hive that fails in February usually failed because of what the mites did to it in September.

The second cause is food. A bee needs varied pollen across a whole season, and a great deal of landscape has been simplified into single crops, mown verges and tidy turf. A thousand acres of one flowering crop is a fortnight's feast and then a famine.

🏡 Suburban Lawns and Spring Forage

Dandelion and white clover are among the first reliable sources of nectar and pollen in spring — available exactly when colonies come out of winter at their weakest and have brood to feed. They are also the two plants suburban lawn culture is most determined to eliminate.

Home and garden pesticides are applied to lawns at concentrations that frequently exceed agricultural rates for the same active ingredients, by people under no obligation to follow a label the way a licensed applicator is. As housing spreads into farmland, mixed forage becomes turf, and turf gets sprayed. The remedy is available to any homeowner: leave the dandelions, skip the broadleaf spray, let the clover be.

🐝 Wild Bees most at Risk

Honeybees are livestock. They are not an endangered species — colony numbers hold up because beekeepers split hives to replace what dies. The bees in real trouble are the wild ones: North America has some four thousand native bee species, many in documented decline, and not one of them has a keeper to make up the losses.

Which is why the beneficiary matters and is named rather than implied. It is chosen by the operator — read what they do and judge the choice for yourself. Every settled round records the beneficiary it actually paid, so changing it never rewrites what came before.

🧾 Where the Money Goes

You buy a drone a seat, and every motion he makes costs a little. Eighty percent of what a round collects is owed to the charity, the winner takes a tenth, and a tenth keeps the service running. Every settled match is recorded with what it raised, and every payment to the charity is recorded with its transaction id — so you can check where it went rather than take anyone's word for it.