I also struggled with the Bluetooth bee. My phone and my Mac could “see” the bee without a problem. I also could connect to the bee from my Mac, using the normal pairing procedure and then connecting over a terminal window with “screen /dev/tty.-DevB 38400” (BTW: screen is a program that is already installed on the Mac). There are also instructions for Linux and Windows on the Wiki pages.
Unfortunately, my son’s Android phone and my iPhone did not discover the bee.
After doing some research on the web, I found out that the iPhone is probably beyond my capabilities. However, for Android phones, there is some hope. My apporach was to buy a different bluetooth bee from DFRobot ( byron76.blogspot.de/ ), which should be doable because the SPI pins are available. I never tried it, though.