Honey, Inc. Research: the 13-tier research tree
Research is the slow, permanent half of your progress — 13 tiers, 57 upgrade groups, and a Research Lab that multiplies the whole thing by up to ten.
Research in Honey, Inc. is the upgrade system sitting underneath everything else on the farm. Where a building level raises your ceiling in one big jump, the research tree raises it in dozens of small steps that never stop compounding. Most players who feel stuck have a fully upgraded building and an untouched research screen.
The system splits into two halves that behave completely differently. Regular research is the 13-tier tree covered on this page, and it is wiped when you reincarnate. Epic research is bought with Honeycombs and is kept forever — that half has its own page. Understanding which is which is the single most useful thing to know before you spend anything.
How the research tree is structured
Regular research is laid out across 13 tiers. Each tier contains four to five upgrade groups, and there are 57 distinct groups in total. Every group has multiple levels, so the real number of individual purchases available to you is several times larger than 57.
That arithmetic is worth a second look, because it tells you something about how the tree is designed. Thirteen tiers at four or five groups each works out to roughly the same 57 slots the game actually has. Groups therefore do not repeat from tier to tier — each one appears once, in one tier, and then deepens through its own levels. When you finish a group, that avenue is done; the next improvement to that part of your farm comes from a different group in a later tier.
This matters for planning. You cannot grind one favorite upgrade forever. Progress through the tree means moving outward into new tiers, which in turn means clearing the tier you are on and keeping your farm value climbing.
Terminology. The game calls these "groups" because a single entry like Comfortable Hives is really a stack of levels, not a one-off purchase. When a guide says "57 research upgrades", it means 57 groups — the level count underneath them is much higher.
The Research Lab gates all of it
Research is not free-floating. It is gated by the Research Lab, one of the four buildings on your farm alongside the Bee Colony, the Storage extractor and the Shipping Depot. The Lab has 6 levels, and each level raises a research multiplier:
| Research Lab level | Research multiplier | Unlock threshold |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1× | 0 |
| 2 | 1.6× | 1,000 |
| 3 | 2.5× | 10,000 |
| 4 | 4× | 100,000 |
| 5 | 6.5× | 1,000,000 |
| 6 | 10× | 10,000,000 |
A tenfold multiplier is an enormous swing, and the thresholds are cheap relative to what the rest of the farm costs later on. Leaving the Lab at level 2 or 3 while you pour everything into the Bee Colony is one of the most common early mistakes. The other three buildings each have 12 levels; the Lab has only 6, so it finishes early and then quietly benefits every research purchase you make for the rest of the run.
What the 57 groups actually cover
The tree is not a random list. Every group targets one of the links in your production chain — bees, hives, honey quality, storage, or shipping — and the later tiers keep escalating the same themes into increasingly absurd science fiction. These are real group names from the game, sorted by what they touch:
| Theme | Example research groups |
|---|---|
| Hives and nurseries | Comfortable Hives · Better Hive Nurseries · Hive Expansion Project · Internal Hive Systems · Climate Controlled Hives · Luxury Bee Habitats · Industrial Hive Automation |
| Honey quality and handling | Premium Nectar Sources · Careful Honey Handling · Bigger Honeycombs · Artisan Honey Certification · Super Pollen Diet · Crystalline Honeycomb Structure |
| Bees and foraging | Active Forager Bonus · Queen Bee Optimization · Synchronized Foraging · Genetic Enhancement Program · Formation Flying Training |
| Shipping and fleet | Shipping Speed I · Titanium Alloy Vehicles · Anti-Gravity Vehicle Upgrades |
| Automation and networking | AI Hive Management · Hive Mind Networking · Transcendent Bee Consciousness |
| Late-game exotic | Quantum Honey Storage · Temporal Acceleration · Dark Matter Containment · Multiversal Honey Synthesis · Timeline Manipulation · Wormhole Hive Stabilization · Relativistic Time Dilation |
Reading the names in order is a decent map of the game's arc. Early tiers are about making a normal bee farm slightly better: nicer hives, better nectar, more careful handling. By the middle of the tree you are running genetic programs and formation flight training. By the end you are containing dark matter and dilating time. The mechanics underneath stay the same — more honey per bee, more capacity, faster shipping — but the scale has moved several orders of magnitude.
Choosing what to research first
Honey, Inc. is a chain: bees fly out and produce, honey lands in storage, storage feeds the depot, the depot ships for cash. A chain only runs as fast as its slowest link, so the right research is usually whichever link is visibly backed up.
- Storage sitting full? You are producing faster than you can ship. Shipping and vehicle research, plus depot levels, will unlock that cash.
- Storage always empty? Shipping has outrun production. Look at bee-side and hive-side groups instead — nurseries, foraging, colony output.
- Bee count pinned at your cap? That is a hive and bee-capacity problem, not a research problem — fix the cap first, then research amplifies the larger number.
The general rule is that research multiplies whatever base you already have, so it pays best when the underlying building or hive tier is already reasonable. Dumping everything into research on a farm with one Base Hive multiplies a very small number.
Do the Lab early. Because the Research Lab multiplier applies to research generally, buying Lab levels before deep research purchases is almost always better than the reverse order. It is one of the few genuinely order-dependent decisions in the game.
Regular research resets — epic research does not
This is the part worth committing to memory. When you reincarnate, the farm resets and your regular research goes with it. All 13 tiers, all 57 groups, back to zero. What survives is your Royal Jellies, your Honeycombs, and every epic research upgrade you own.
That asymmetry shapes the whole economy. Regular research is a within-run investment: it should be spent freely, because holding onto resources through a reset gains you nothing on that side of the ledger. Epic research is the long-term investment, and Honeycombs spent there are never lost. Two epic upgrades in particular touch this page directly — Research Subsidies and Rapid Research Mode both concern the research system, and both persist across resets while the tree they affect does not.
Practically, that means a mature player rebuilds the regular tree every cycle, but rebuilds it faster each time, because the permanent bonuses stacked underneath make the early tiers trivial. If your last run took two days to reach a given honey type and the next one takes six hours, that is epic research doing its job.
New to the game and not sure where research sits among everything else? Start with how to play and the beginner tips, then come back once you have the Lab past level 3.