Bee 52

About

Bee 52 casts you as a honeybee tasked with pollinating flowers while fending off pests. The side-scrolling platformer splits its 12 levels across three distinct zones backyard, swamp, and house each escalating in challenge. You’ll zap spiders, dodge slugs, and outmaneuver ants using a proboscis that doubles as a projectile weapon. Progress relies on collecting scattered flowers and returning to the hive to refill a honey jar. Later levels introduce dragonflies and venus flytraps, mixing environmental hazards with enemy swarms. The NES version sticks to simple controls but the Commodore 64 edition leaked into mail-order sales after Codemasters abandoned the platform, making it a niche curiosity. The game’s charm lies in its quirky premise and escalating difficulty. Early levels feel manageable but by the house stages, dodging moving obstacles while tracking hidden flowers becomes a frantic dance. Community archives note the C64 version’s odd legacy programmer sold copies directly after Codemasters dropped the project, giving it a cultish backstory. While not graphically ambitious, the shifting environments and varied enemy types keep the formula fresh. Bee 52’s blend of platforming and resource management offers a brief but memorable trip into a buggy, hostile world.

Storyline

The player controls Bee 52, a honeybee with large eyes and a fly-like sucker for a mouth, through which it can spit projectiles at enemies. The game is played through 12 levels, the first four in a backyard, the next four in a swamp, and the last four inside a house. There are traps and enemies added for each level, from ants, grasshoppers, and even dragonflies and "venus flytraps" in the later levels. The player must find and collect from many flowers scattered all over the sidescrolling level and return to the hive after three flowers are visited to add honey to the jar. The level is complete when the jar is full, in the case of levels 3-12, this requires every flower to be visited.