Honeybee Waggle-Dance Foraging & Recruitment (2D)

Colony & Meadow

Colony size 50

Patch richness & regrowth 50%

Waggle-dance recruitment 50%

Obstacles in flight path 3

Live Readout

Elapsed time

0.0 s

Active foragers

Nectar collected

0.0 u

Hive reserve

0.0 u

Scouts searching

Patches known

0 / 6

How it works

Bees start as unrecruited scouts flying a correlated random walk out from the hive. A scout that stumbles onto a flower patch harvests nectar, flies home, and deposits it — and while it dances, it adds a weighted vote to that patch's recruitment signal: quality × 1/(1+distance/260), so rich, nearby patches get danced for more strongly than poor or distant ones, mirroring the real waggle dance's distance-and-quality encoding.

Idle bees leaving the hive sample the current recruitment signals; the stronger a patch's signal, the more likely it recruits the next forager instead of that bee scouting blind.
Recruitment signals decay continuously, so a patch that has been harvested dry stops attracting new foragers within seconds — the colony reallocates itself toward whichever patch is currently paying off.
Obstacles force every bee — scout or recruit — to steer around them mid-flight, adding real navigation cost on top of the communication model.

Hive Flower patch Obstacle Scout Recruited / harvesting Returning with nectar