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🐝 The Landmark Studies That Taught Us How Honey Bees Think and Work

About this simulation

Almost everything we know about honey bee behaviour traces back to a handful of pivotal experiments. This lab replays two of the most famous: Karl von Frisch's decoding of the waggle dance (Nobel Prize, 1973) and Thomas Seeley's discovery that swarms choose a new nest through a distributed, democratic quorum process.

Von Frisch: Waggle Dance

• A scout returning from food performs a figure-eight dance on the vertical comb.
• Waggle angle — the tilt of the run from vertical equals the angle between the food and the sun's azimuth.
• Run duration — longer runs encode farther distances (~75ms per 100m).
• Followers decode both cues by touch and vibration in total darkness, then fly the vector themselves.

Seeley: Nest-Site Quorum Sensing

• When a colony swarms, hundreds of scouts independently inspect candidate cavities and dance for the one they found — dancing more vigorously for better sites.
• Scouts recruit more scouts to good sites faster than to poor ones, so votes snowball toward the best option.
• Once roughly 15–20 scouts are present at one site simultaneously (the quorum), that site is locked in and the whole swarm flies there together.
• Seeley's team tested this with island experiments offering real nest boxes of different quality, confirming the quorum threshold model.

Controls

• Experiment — switch between the two studies.
• Waggle-dance mode: set food angle, distance and sun azimuth.
• Quorum mode: set the quorum threshold and scouting speed, then watch which site wins. Re-roll site quality for a new race.
• Drag to rotate the camera, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

Seeley's quorum-sensing model for bee swarms is now used as an analogy in collective-decision research on everything from neuron firing thresholds to robot swarms — a case where insect behaviour directly inspired engineering.