How to Play Honey, Inc.
A full walkthrough of how to play Honey, Inc. — the idle bee game where bees make honey, trucks turn honey into cash, and cash buys the upgrades that do it all faster.
The loop you are actually playing
Honey, Inc. is a bee farm game built on one repeating cycle. Everything else in the game — research, boosts, prestige — is a way of making that cycle turn faster. Learn the cycle first and the rest of the menus stop looking intimidating.
- Hives spawn bees. Your farm has up to four hive slots, and bees come out of them.
- Bees make honey. They fly out, collect, and return. Each bee produces honey at a rate set by your Bee Colony level.
- Honey fills storage. The Honey Extractor holds it. Storage has a capacity — a ceiling on how much honey can be waiting at once.
- Vehicles ship it for cash. The Shipping Depot sends out your fleet, which carries honey away and brings back money.
- Cash buys upgrades. Better bees, better hives, better buildings — which raise the ceiling on step 2, 3 and 4.
- Repeat, but bigger. And it keeps running for a while after you close the app.
Cash is the soft currency and it comes from exactly one place: shipping honey. If your cash income has stalled, the fault is somewhere in that chain — not enough bees, not enough honey per bee, not enough room to store it, or not enough truck to move it.
Your first session
Nothing is locked behind a tutorial wall. In your first few minutes you should:
- Get bees out of the hive and watch a shipment complete, so you can see the whole chain once.
- Spend your first cash on the cheap upgrade tiers — early bee and hive slot costs are trivially low (the second Base Hive slot costs 100) and each one compounds.
- Tap any wasp that flies across the farm. They appear roughly every 30 to 90 seconds and drop cash or Honeycombs.
- Open the mail and news screens when they light up — they carry rewards, not just text.
What to upgrade first
Early on, your bee stats are the cheapest lever you have. There are two of them and they do different jobs.
| Level | Bee capacity | Cost | Refill rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 50 | — | 1.0 / sec | — |
| 2 | 100 | 1,200 | 1.6 / sec | 2,400 |
| 3 | 200 | 7,200 | 2.4 / sec | 14,400 |
| 4 | 350 | 43,200 | 3.6 / sec | 86,400 |
| 5 | 500 | 259,200 | 5.4 / sec | 518,400 |
Capacity is the size of your bee pool, topping out at 500. Refill rate is how quickly that pool comes back, from 1 bee per second to 5.4. Think about them together: a large pool with a slow refill drains and makes you wait, while a fast refill is still capped by how many bees you may have out. The bees page covers the trade-off.
Hive slots come next. You get four slots maximum, across nine hive tiers. Starting Base Hive slots cost 0, 100, 600 and 3,600 — cheap enough to fill immediately. Upgrading a slot to the next tier is a much bigger jump: an Improved Hive slot starts at 21,600. See hives for the tier list.
The four buildings
Your farm has four buildings. Three of them sit on the production chain in order — make, store, ship — and the fourth unlocks research.
| Building | What it controls | Levels | Multiplier at max |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bee Colony | Honey produced per bee (base 0.5, then 0.8, 1.2, 1.8, 2.7, 4 …) | 12 | 133.4× |
| Storage (Honey Extractor) | Storage capacity (base 100) and processing speed (1 up to 144) | 12 | 4,095× |
| Shipping Depot | Shipping rate, and which vehicles you can use | 12 | 243.8× |
| Research Lab | Research multiplier (1 → 1.6 → 2.5 → 4 → 6.5 → 10×) | 6 | 10× |
Notice how differently they scale: storage capacity ends up multiplied by 4,095, shipping by 243.8, and honey per bee by 133.4. Honey that has nowhere to sit is honey you are not being paid for. The full level-by-level numbers live on the buildings page.
The Shipping Depot does two jobs — its level raises your shipping rate and gates the fleet. There are twelve vehicles, from the Base Cart carrying 17 units of honey up to the Hexaloop Tanker carrying 16,666,667. Bigger is not automatically better: speed drops from 1.0 on the small carts to 0.45 on the largest, so a huge tanker makes fewer, slower trips.
When research opens
The Research Lab has six levels, and each level has an unlock threshold you cross as the farm grows: 0, then 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 and 10,000,000. The first level is available from the start, so research is an early-game system, not a late-game one — and its multiplier climbing to 10× makes it one of the largest single levers in the game.
There are two separate research systems and it is worth not confusing them:
- Regular research — 13 tiers, four or five upgrade groups per tier, 57 distinct groups in total, each with multiple levels. Names like Comfortable Hives, Premium Nectar Sources, Shipping Speed I and Queen Bee Optimization tell you what they touch.
- Epic research — 18 upgrades bought with Honeycombs. These persist across reincarnation, which makes them the most durable purchase in the game.
Farm value, and why there is no player level
Honey, Inc. has no XP bar and no character level. Progression is measured by Farm Value — a single number describing how much your farm is worth. It is the stat that gates content, and it is the one to watch when you are wondering whether you are "far enough along".
Farm value is also grouped into Scale of Production (SoP) tiers. Tier 0 sits at 1,000 farm value and each tier after that is a thousand times the last — 1,000,000, then a billion, then a trillion, all the way to tier 20 at 1e63. Those tiers matter socially too: if someone invited you with a referral code, their reward unlocks once you reach SoP tier 2. More edge cases like that are collected in the FAQ.
Honey types: the mid-game reset
There are ten honey types, and each one is worth vastly more than the last — Basic Honey has a base value of 2, Wildflower 25, Clover 150, and it climbs to 18,000,000 for Temporal Honey. Each type needs a farm value threshold before it unlocks.
Read this before you switch. Moving to a new honey type starts a fresh farm at that type's base value. It is not a straight upgrade — it is a mid-game reset, and the new farm opens in the morning with everything scaled back down. Switch when you are ready to rebuild, not the second the button lights up. There is more on the timing in our beginner tips.
Honeycombs, wasps and boosts
Honeycombs are the hard currency. You get them from wasps, crates, mail, daily rewards, ads and referrals, and the game validates them server-side. They buy epic research and boosts — temporary multipliers with names like Hive Frenzy, Auto-Hive Spawn, Buzz Beacon, Cash Injection and Money Printer.
Wasps are your steadiest free source. Common wasps cross the farm roughly every 30 to 90 seconds; Elite wasps show up roughly every 8 to 14 minutes and carry the better reward band. Cash drops scale off your current balance, so a wasp tapped late is worth far more than the same wasp tapped early.
Playing while the app is closed
This is an idle game, so the farm keeps working without you. The base offline window is 2 hours, and each honey jar you hold adds another hour of stored offline time. While you are away your bees run at 80% efficiency — but 100% of the honey they produce is retained, and you get an away-time summary when you come back. If you are new to the genre, our explainer on what an idle game is covers why this design exists at all.
The long game: reincarnation
Reincarnation is the prestige layer. It resets your farm in exchange for Royal Jellies, and has two requirements: honey tier 4 (Acacia Honey) at minimum, and at least 25,000,000 in earnings on the current run.
Each Royal Jelly grants a permanent +1.2% earnings bonus, capped at +25% total — so Royal Jellies are not an infinite scaling engine. The real reason to reincarnate is that Honeycombs and epic research survive the reset, so every cycle starts with advantages the previous run paid for.
A reasonable order to do things in
- Fill your bee capacity and refill upgrades while they are cheap.
- Buy all four hive slots at the current tier before pushing one slot to the next tier.
- Keep storage ahead of the colony so honey has somewhere to sit.
- Level the depot when shipments are the bottleneck, not before.
- Take the Research Lab early and keep regular research moving.
- Spend Honeycombs on epic research before boosts — epic upgrades are permanent.
- Push to Acacia Honey, then start thinking in reincarnation cycles.