I love bees

''ILoveBees redirects here. For the blog, see I Love Bees (Blog). For the website, see I Love Bees (Website).'' i love bees is an alternate reality game developed by 4orty2wo Entertainment used for the marketing of Halo 2. During the summer of 2004, the website ilovebees.com was used as a publicity site for Halo 2, with the site being pointed to by adverts for the game during movie trailers. Ostensibly a beekeeper's personal site, the server appeared to have been taken over by an unstable AI whose thoughts are scattered on the site.

Background
DICKS!!!!

Characters

 * Melissa
 * Operator
 * Sleeping Princess
 * Durga
 * Seeker
 * Janissary James
 * Jersey Morelli
 * Kamal Zaman
 * Colonel Herzog
 * Major Standish
 * Thin Kinkle
 * Rani Sobeck
 * Sophia Bossedon
 * Aiden Maki

Others

 * UNSC Apocalypso
 * Chatter
 * Moons

Canon status
The issue of whether i love bees should be considered canon is somewhat unclear. In the Apocalypso Chat, the minds behind i love bees say that Bungie basically let them write their own thing, but offered certain suggestions regarding storytelling devices and corrected facets such as the original idea that ONI would hang traitors, which was changed to them being rendered permanently comatose. In October 2004, this was expanded on by Joseph Staten in an interview with halo.bungie.org, who, when asked if i love bees should be considered canon, said:

However, in the July 28, 2006, Frank O'Connor mentioned the revised state of canon as applied to i love bees. In answering a question about how the Halo Graphic Novel expanded the Halo universe beyond the games and Bungie's overall plans for the universe, he said:

This was shown in the graphic novel as two characters from i love bees, Herzog and Standish, are referenced in a canon image, as well as events in the i love bees storyline in which they took place. Additionally, entities introduced in i love bees, including Optican, chatters, and communications kiosks, were later featured in Halo 3: ODST. The colony Mamore was mentioned prominently in Halo: Reach. Finally, several key elements of i love bees, including Melissa, the and the Deep-Space Artifact are included in the officially canon Halo Encyclopedia.

Still, i love bees cannot be considered entirely canonical. Some elements of i love bees directly contradict more recent material of definite canon status, such as the time in which Tobias Fleming Shaw and Wallace Fujikawa were alive. Thus, i love bees could be considered as having a similar canonical level to the Star Wars series' Expanded Universe, in which i love bees should be considered canonical unless contradicted by more authoritative sources.

Trivia

 * It is possible, with an Ipod or Ipod Touch, to speed up the time on the countdown, however the closest year a person is able to reach is 2038 and the countdown only loses a few thousand hours.
 * Yuri Lowenthal, voice of Kamal Zaman, is also the voice of the Prince in the Prince of Persia series, and Sasuke in the Naruto series. A piece of Kamal's dialog, "People think time is a river that flows in one direction, but time is an ocean." seems to be a deliberate reference to the Prince's "Some say time is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction, but I have seen the face of time and I can tell you they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm."
 * Soon after ILB became popular, someone bought the domain name www.ilovepees.com and auctioned it on eBay. The person claimed whoever made it a redirect to their own site would get tons of traffic from ILB fans who would type in the address incorrectly. Their starting bid was $1,000, but when it failed to sell, they made two more auctions, each lowering the price. It was finally sold for a price close to $40.
 * The Walk-away Girl Story line from Axon Clips Chapter 1 went through 56 revisions before it was final.
 * The game was re-written in midstream in order to accommodate players who wanted to see more puzzles. Since the radio play was pre-recorded, the rewrite was what brought the live calls.
 * There were 7 hours worth of script written in 5 months.
 * The lack of ability to beta-test meant that 5 hours before the phone calls went live, the Puppet Masters were still trying to see if the payphones would ring.
 * The Puppet Masters had not expected Weephun to rat out the Sleeping Princess so easily and had to do quite a bit of rewriting in order to deal with it.
 * When they went live in week 1, week 8 was still unwritten.
 * 4orty2wo Entertainment was very careful not to mention who the client was because the players would get turned off if the advertising was too overt.
 * A player tried to answer a live call in the middle of Hurricane Ivan. The Puppet Master (Puppetmaster 2) broke character to tell him to run to safety: "Dude, it's a hurricane. Put the phone down."
 * The countdown did not appear for Mozilla Firefox users, and still, to this day, does not appear for them.
 * i love bees is mentioned in a Cracked.com article called The 5 Most Insane Alternate Reality Games.