The Hive Slot Review

You play on a quite different game screen in the shape of a honeycomb. The honeycomb on The Hive slot consists of 19 cells. All these cells have their own spinning reel. Just like the boxes on the Jack Hammer slot machine from NetEnt.
Betsoft has 30 paylines crammed into this honeycomb. Paylines are adjacent cells in a straight line. You have paylines of three, four and five positions.
Three different types of bees will buzz by at random times during the game:
Drone Bees fill the honey meter with honey. This allows you to get the free spins faster.
Worker Bees boost a stacked multiplier. The height of the multiplier depends on how many worker bees you zoom around the screen. For every worker bee you get +1 on the multiplier and on top of that you always get +1 as a gift.
Queen Bees send a group of Drone Bees or Worker Bees towards your honeycomb.
You can bet on The Hive from as little as € 0.10. The maximum bet is on the low side: € 10.00 per spin.

Like most Betsoft slots, The Hive also has a low variance. That means that you often have a prize, but the prices are generally prizes. Prizes, like you win at the fair. And no prizes like you can grab on Megaways slots.
There are three groups of symbols that immediately yield a prize:
playing cards pay out from 0.1 times your stake for three times the J, Q, K or the A. The maximum payout on playing cards is half the stake. You win that with five times the K or five times the A.
three different flowers – red, white and purple, pay out from 0.3 to 0.8 times your stake per combination.
beneficial insects are worth up to 5 times your stake (ladybug) or 10 times your stake (the bee).
In combination with the multipliers of the Worker Bees, the prizes can go up a bit. The honey jar plays for Wild symbol.

There is a bottle next to your honeycomb. You start with an empty bottle. The Drone Bees fill this bottle with honey. Each Drone Bee adds one level of honey. If you look closely you will see that you need a total of 20 Drone Bees to fill the bottle with orange juice honey.
Note: if you adjust your bet, you start again with an empty bottle. So you cannot fill the bottle with honey with spins of €0.10, and then switch to a bet of a tenner per spin when the bottle is almost full.
A full bottle gives 5 free spins. You play it without buzzing bees around your honeycomb. You can therefore not re-trigger the free spins. You need a full bottle for that. A consolation: even if bees were buzzing around your screen, they would not be able to fill the bottle completely in 5 spins.
You do play the free spins with Honey Burst Spreading Wilds. You start with three Spreading Wilds. The Wilds remain on your screen during the free spins. Each spin adds a Wild on an adjacent cell.