The Bee Jar

The Bee Jar serves each day a hexagonal hive in which you trace paths of letters to harvest as many words as possible. What sets it apart from usual path-tracing games is that a path may pass over the same tile multiple times, and the hive has no fixed shape: the day's board is described as a uniquely shaped hive. A new hive appears worldwide every day at midnight Eastern Time, and everyone receives the same board.

1. Choose your hive in the selector at the top of the page, between the day's hive and the offered variants.
2. Press Start hive: as long as nothing has been started, the board stays blurred and the game warns that the timer only starts with you.
3. Trace a word by dragging over hexagons that share an edge, or by tapping them one by one; the path may return to a tile that has already been used.
4. Submit from three letters onward, using the Enter key, the undo and clear buttons, or automatic submission on trace if it is enabled in settings.
5. Keep harvesting: the hive remains open, and you can return to it later via the archive.

It's a harvesting game rather than a single-solution game: there is nothing to find uniquely, only a hive to empty as far as your vocabulary allows. Two design choices set it apart clearly: the right to revisit the same tiles, which completely changes the geometry of findable words, and a timer that pauses as soon as attention drifts elsewhere, except in the Honey Rush format which does exactly the opposite.

Feedback is immediate and numeric: each accepted word feeds the SCORE, WORDS, BEST WORD and TIME counters, fills the column of found words on the right, and updates the hive leaderboard automatically. The scoring system is published in full: each letter's value is shown in small circles beneath the tile, length multipliers apply starting at five letters, then seven, then nine, and a rarity bonus is added after submission depending on whether the word is common, uncommon, rare or unique. A left column additionally shows community milestones, words found and cumulative points by all players, refreshed in batches. The share button notes that results never reveal letters.

Daily Hive

The daily board shared by everyone, renewed at midnight Eastern Time.

Daily Wildcomb

A second daily hive, numbered separately from the main hive, with its own leaderboard.

Honey Rush

The tense format: you must be signed in, the board is revealed when you are ready, and you have a single three-minute attempt with no pauses at all, including if you open a panel, leave the page, refresh or lose connection. The result locks in at the end of the time.

Hive archive

All past hives remain open: old scores and leaderboards continue to update when new words are found there.

Word Chain

Announced in the day's banner and accessible from the navigation bar.

• A normal hive's timer pauses as soon as you open a panel, change tabs, refresh or leave the page, and only resumes after you choose Resume: you can therefore think without losing time. This leniency is entirely absent in Honey Rush, where nothing stops the clock.
• Rare letters like J, Q, X and Z are worth more than others, and each tile's value is written underneath: a short word with an expensive letter can score more than an average-length word of common letters.
• Returning to a tile already visited is allowed as often as the path permits, which opens up words impossible in a classic path-tracing game: think of double letters before searching further.
• Some hives have a twist announced in the Special rules panel, gold tiles that double a letter's value, hives with crowns that boost uncommon, rare or unique words: read that panel before starting the timer.