A resting worker's wingbeat drives the hive's background hum at roughly 230–260 Hz, with faint harmonic overtones near 500 and 750 Hz — a narrow, stable band that barely wanders. This simulation renders that hum, and two well-documented departures from it, as a scrolling frequency-vs-time spectrogram: brighter pixels mean more acoustic energy at that frequency at that moment.
- Queenless — once a colony loses its queen, worker sound shifts to a higher, more erratic pitch (roughly 300–500 Hz here) as workers agitate and search — sometimes called the "queenless roar". The band widens and flickers instead of holding steady.
- Pre-swarm piping — before a colony swarms, a virgin (or about-to-emerge) queen produces short tooting pulses — a tone near 300–350 Hz that glides slightly downward — while rival queens confined in their cells answer with muffled quacking bursts. The result is a periodic pulse pattern layered over the ordinary hum, not a continuous tone shift.
The dashed band overlaid on the spectrogram tracks whichever frequency range is diagnostic for the selected state, and the readout panel reports the instantaneous dominant frequency the same way a real acoustic-monitoring rig's frequency analyzer would.
This is the flat 2D companion to the 3D acoustic-monitoring-honey-bee-colonies-lab hive rig: the same buzz-frequency diagnostic bands, viewed as a live spectrogram instead of a 3D probe-microphone scene.