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Nectar · A beekeeping garden

Grow flowers.
Jar the honey.

Plant a garden for your bees and watch them work it, trip by trip. Only flowers in bloom make nectar, and every jar takes the colour of the flowers the bees visited. When the hive is full, you harvest it by hand: uncap the frame, spin the extractor, and hold to pour.

iPhone & iPad iOS 17 Free No ads, no purchases

Coming to the App Store.

No ads, no analytics, no tracking, and no servers of ours
Two honey-coloured hives in a hexagonal garden at evening, beds of lavender, clover, borage and sunflowers around them, bees in the air, a pond, a tree, lanterns, a bench and a fountain
A GARDEN AT GOLDEN HOUR
The harvest's pour step: honey running from the extractor's tap into a jar two-thirds full
HOLD TO POUR
The pantry: ten jars on wooden shelves, from pale gold to nearly black, with a card for a jar of Sunflower Gold below
EVERY JAR ITS OWN COLOUR
Hive inspection: a frame of capped honey with bees on it, and cards for the bees, the queen, the stores and the mites
INSIDE THE HIVE

A living garden

Gentle by design

The garden is a small hexagonal island with the hive in the middle. Flowers go in a tile at a time; they sprout, bloom on their own clock and fade. A day is fifteen minutes long, with a golden evening and a short night when the bees stay home, and the weather is the same for every garden: sunny days, showers, and snow that settles in winter.

Nothing dies and nothing withers. A faded bed waits for you to clear it, time away is caught up for you, and the colony never collapses. The choice that makes it a game is a small one: spend your honey on the garden, or jar it.

  • Seven flowers, each with its own honey, and 35 kinds of honey to find by mixing them.
  • Visitors: six butterflies to spot, hedgehogs, frogs, robins, blue tits, and moths at the evening primrose. Wasps to shoo from the hive, and swarms to catch before they leave.
  • Keeping bees: add supers, feed, treat for mites and spot the queen. Build up to three hives, raise new queens from the one you choose, and make candles and balm from the wax.
  • A garden of your own: ten levels, eleven decorations, new ground to lay, a pond that moves, a painted hive and a sign by the path.
Close to the hive at dusk: a hedgehog on the lawn, a frog on the path, a blue tit at the bird bath and a moth at the evening primrose
VISITORS AT DUSK
The same garden in winter, snow lying on the lawn and the hive roofs
SNOW IN WINTER

Neighbours

A town that shares one sky

Neighbours send orders for the honey they want, and a jar that fits is sent with one tap. Join the town, and you can visit other players' gardens as they grow, buy and sell jars at the market, vote each week for the best garden and the best honey, enter the weekly honey show, and give to each season's fair.

The town runs on iCloud. There is no sign-up and no account of ours; other players see your garden, its name and sign, and the jars you sell, and nothing else about you. Every name, sign and label passes a word filter, every garden and jar can be reported or blocked, and the town has rules that joining agrees to.

The order board: three neighbours asking for white clover and golden honey, each with a jar from the shelf ready to send
NEIGHBOURS' ORDERS
The town market: six jars from three gardens, from dark amber to water white, each with its price
THE TOWN MARKET

Everything is drawn by the game's own Metal renderer, from the bees' wings to the honey's colour, which is worked out from how much light each flower's honey absorbs. Every sound, the buzz of the garden included, is made on the device as you play.

Nectar

A garden, a hive, the honey harvested by hand, and a town to trade it in. Free, with no ads and no purchases.

Coming to the App Store

iPhone & iPad · iOS 17 or later