A movie trailer for Halo 2 that flashed “www.ilovebees.com” for a split second led the curious to a beekeeping site that seemed to have been hijacked by a sentient virus. Puzzles at the site are so intricate that they must be solved by people working together at ARG sites like www.unfiction.com. For example, sets of seemingly random Web addresses turned out to have phrases in common that could be pieced together into a brief story.

—Blur Fantasy with Reality and Wrap It in a PUzzle (NY Times)

Rebecca Villano, who last semester was in my American Lit class, sent me the following e-mail while I was on vacation. She was hip to the “ilovebees.com” game before this article appeared.

Dr. Jerz! I totally thought of you today! Since you had us read “Pattern Recognition” I thought that I would mention a little “Pattern Recognition” of my own.

I don’t know if you know, but Halo 2 has been causing such chaos due to the extreme mystery of it all. The creators refuse to show anything for the one player mode, and they are very secretive. That said:

My fiance stumbled upon a trailer for Halo 2. In this trailer, it flashes a website for a couple seconds: www.Ilovebees.com

If one would go to this website, one would begin to read and hear sound files of bees. From what is said on this site, once you break down the pictures of this lady and her bees, you’d see a text file encripted within the pictures. These text files are supposingly the story between Halo 1 and Halo 2. Also, if you were to listen to the bees, you’d hear sounds very much like Halo.

This seems very similar to Pattern Recognition where the one film piece had a hidden map inside it. Apparently, with the creators of Halo, their favorite number is 7. Seven times seven times seven, or something like that, is 343 which is also the title of the main map in which, in one player mode, in Halo 1, one descovers that the main computer system is an AI and controls everything.

Also on this women’s website is a counter for 25 days. It is believed that this is the count down until Halo 2 releases a demo for one player. All through out this woman’s website is Halo information, and on one spot in this site, is an anagram for when the demo will be released. However, the anagram also spells out “I love bees” or something like that.

Also, if you would e-mail ladybee777@hotmail.com it auto respons with gibberish that’s almost english but not.

Personally, I could care less, but I thought of you and Pattern Recognition and laughed. So, here you go!