Peter Nichols Built a Colony Sim for the Last Honey Bees

Peter Nichols, the Los Angeles artist and developer behind Elfsend, released Buzzkeeper on November 7, a free browser game about keeping the last honey bee hive on Earth alive. Grim! The release announcement calls it "an emotional colony sim based on real behavioral research and climate prediction" and Nicholas has m tightened this last ditch effort to forty minutes to cover a single queen's reign. The goal and the hope is to raise a new queen before a new queen before the old one dies and frost arrives. It's a nice nod to Avery Alder's The Quiet Year that also tracks a community on the edge of collapse.

Here though, the systems are the main feature. According to the game's page, the game mimics the lives of a few hundred to a few thousand bees, each moving through jobs over a roughly 21-day life: cleaner, brood nurse, builder, forager and, last, explorer, "the most dangerous job." That places you as a bit of type of Football Manager, never steering individual bees but setting an overall approach instead. You adjust age brackets that decide who does what, evaluating pollen sources by pesticide risk and distance, and cleaning a brood infested with Varroa mites. Real-world data also features in play with NASA climate projections for the end of this century.

Nichols built it in two weeks as an entry to thatgamejam #02, the jam run by thatgamecompany, whose theme was a single piece of music. The jam drew 521 entries, and voting runs through December 11. Sound design is by Christopher Taylor of Body Meat. The page lists the game as a prototype made with AI-assisted code, and

Nichols and Elf's End have chosen to decenter humans in all of their work; Crude Oil cast the player as a puddle of petroleum, Dolf hands a trashed planet to dolphins, and Buzzkeeper makes you a superorganism. There also may be something broader about game makers responding to the plight of bees. In May, Kyriaki Goni told Killscreen about Telling the Bees, a speculative game about finding the last surviving bees, built on the old ritual of telling the hive about births and deaths. Nichols says, "I might expand it to a full game," so I hope to see more.

For more reading see Cybernetic dolphins take up mini-golf in Dolf; What Would You Do If You Had to Find the Last Surviving Bees?; A song is the whole theme of thatgamejam #02; The Backrooms Were Always About Games, the podcast where Crude Oil came up; and NASA's NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 dataset, the climate model behind the game's weather.