Desk Hive is a gentle idle beekeeping sim that lives on your desktop while you do other things. You start with one hive, a smoker, and some bees. Over time you grow more colonies, upgrade your equipment, and slowly automate the whole operation. The bees keep working when you close the game.

Gameplay

Each hive runs in real time. Workers forage, honey fills up the supers, and new bees hatch from brood frames. Every colony has a queen with her own traits that affect how fast the hive grows and how much honey it makes. You can upgrade brood boxes to raise worker capacity, install more frames to improve efficiency, and keep sugar feed stocked so the bees don't starve when winter arrives.

Seasons change every six hours whether you're playing or not. Spring is good for building up your workforce. Summer brings the strongest nectar flow. Autumn slows everything down and it's your last chance to stock supplies. Winter is harsh: nectar drops to nearly nothing, brood production grinds to a halt, and every hive burns through sugar feed just to stay alive. A full year cycles in 24 real hours.

The production chain

When a honey super is full, you use the smoker to calm the hive, harvest the frames, and queue extractor jobs to spin raw honey into bulk product. Better extractors process bigger batches and run more jobs at once. Once you own two hives, you unlock jarring stations that package bulk honey into jars worth a lot more money. Sell the jars, sell the wax, reinvest in your apiary.

Upgrades come in three tiers: brood boxes for colony size, extractors for processing speed, and jarring stations for packaging throughput. You can also add more honey supers per hive and install extra brood frames to squeeze out more efficiency.

Automation

Seven automation upgrades let you step back from the busywork as your apiary grows. Auto smoke keeps harvest ready hives calm. Extractor loader harvests and queues extraction jobs on its own. Collector tray grabs finished extractor output. Sales contract sells off excess honey when storage gets full. Supply clerk restocks jars and sugar feed at thresholds you set. Jar line assistant keeps packaging batches running. Apiary supervisor extends everything across hives you're not currently watching.

Offline progress

Close the game and everything keeps running. The simulation covers up to 36 real hours while you're gone, the first 12 at full speed and then gradually slower. When you come back you get a summary of what your bees made: honey produced, jars filled, wax collected, money earned, jobs finished.

No pressure

There's no fail state. If you forget to stock sugar feed before winter, your colonies just slow way down. They don't die. Check in when you feel like it, queue up some jobs, tweak your automation, and let the bees do the rest.