I Love Bees was first advertised by a hidden message in a Halo 2 trailer; players who investigated the titular website discovered that the pages appeared to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence.

As players solved puzzles, audio logs were posted to the ilovebees.com site which gradually revealed more of the fictional back-story, involving a marooned artificial intelligence stranded on Earth and its attempts to put itself back together.

[1] I Love Bees began when jars of honey were received in the mail by people who had previously participated in alternate reality games.

[2] At around the same time, theatrical trailers for Halo 2 concluded with the Xbox logo and a URL, Xbox.com, that quickly flashed a link to ilovebees.com,[3] ostensibly a hacked site related to beekeeping.

[5] For example, the game presented players with 210 pairs of global positioning system coordinates and time codes, with no indications to what the locations referred to.

[10] The game's plot begins with a military spaceship crashing to Earth in an unknown location, leaving the craft's controlling artificial intelligence (AI) damaged.

To the distress of Dana Awbrey, the website's maintainer, Melissa's attempts to send signals began to appear largely as codes, hidden in images or other text, interfering with the operation of the I Love Bees site and corrupting much of the content.

[11] Dana, attempting to regain control over the corrupted website, accidentally erases data which comprises part of Melissa's memory.

[11] The Flea continues to overwrite Melissa's programming with its own mysterious goals, with it eventually being revealed that it is actually an espionage AI more properly called the Seeker, built by the Covenant.

In a 2006 interview, however, Bungie's content manager Frank O'Connor expressly confirmed that I Love Bees is part of "things that we embrace as canon.

[16] Weisman stated that the goal of I Love Bees was to utilize every person who interacted with the game, and to use any electronic resource to do so: "If we could make your toaster print something we would.

"[20] Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst, noted that I Love Bees achieved what it had been designed to do: "This kind of viral guerrilla marketing worked ... Everyone started instant messaging about it and checking out the site.

[25] I Love Bees was also announced as the winner of a Webby Award in the Game-Related category,[26] presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Along with 42 Entertainment's previous ARG known as The Beast, I Love Bees is credited with bringing greater attention to the fledgling marketing form; I Love Bees not only helped assuage fears by marketers about the costs of ARG failure, but attracted interest from other game developers in using alternate reality games to promote their own products.

[11] In a 2016 Bandcamp interview, artist Ramona Andra Xavier, known for pioneering the Vaporwave musical genre under the pseudonym Vektroid (among others), claimed to be acutely influenced by "I Love Bees," in its use of "hacked" websites, internet communities and IRL tasks to blur the lines between reality and fiction.