Date 1 AprAdults 0Foragers 0Honey 0 kgFlow 0 kg/dWeather —FPS 0

Drag to orbit, wheel or pinch to zoom, camera buttons on the right. The bees are drawn about 2.5x larger than life; the colony itself (up to 25,000 bees) is simulated numerically.

Meadow Apiary: Colony, Nectar Flow and Pollination

Run one hive from 1 April to 31 October: queen, brood, foragers, weather, nectar flow, varroa and orchard pollination. Educational model, not beekeeping advice.

Camera

Beekeeper actions

Smoke calms the bees only visually here; it does not change the biology. Treat varroa: educational stand-in, real treatments need a vet or bee inspector.

Colony and field

Time

Frame (macro view)

Colony live readouts

Bees by role and brood

Honey stores and nectar flow

Waggle dance reader

A forager that found a rich patch repeats a figure-eight on the vertical comb. The waggle run points at the patch: angle from vertical = bearing minus Sun azimuth, run duration grows with distance.

Season report

Run the season to the end (day 214) to see the report.

Independent numerical checks

Controls

Drag / one finger: orbit; wheel / pinch: zoom; keys 1-4: camera presets; Space: pause.
Add honey super before the main flow (about mid May to mid June); without space the honey fills the brood nest and laying stalls.
Time scale = simulated days per real second (1 day is about 2 s at default). Sliders change the model live; presets set several at once.
Dance quiz: read the dance window, set the bearing and distance you decode, then check.

The science

Brood and age cohorts. Eggs per day L = L_max f(season) Q g(space), L_max = 1500 per day (typical, queen-dependent). Brood ages in a 21-day queue (egg 3 d, larva 6 d, pupa 12 d); on day 21 a worker emerges as a house bee. g(space) falls when honey and pollen fill the cells of the two brood boxes (130,000 cells; one cell holds about 0.35 g honey).

Division of labour. House bees become foragers at rate r = r₀ (1 - p_f/p_target)⁺, p_f = forager share: a colony short of foragers recruits more. Mortality: house 0.01 d^-1 (0.004 for autumn "winter bees"), foragers mu_f = 0.125 + 0.05 (bad weather) + 0.004 D with D = varroa mites per 100 bees.

Nectar. nectar/day = min(F x 10 trips x 40 mg x phi(weather), field supply), phi = 1, 0.6, 0.3, 0, 0 for clear, cloudy, windy, rain, cool. Nectar (about 30 % sugar) is dried to honey (about 80 %): honey = nectar / 2.5, the rest is evaporated water. Adults eat about 4 mg honey/day, larvae about 5 mg.

Waggle dance. The angle of the waggle run from vertical equals the angle between the Sun and the food source; run duration tau = k d with k about 0.8 s per km. Real dances are noisy (sigma about 15 deg); the reader shows the noiseless signal.

Varroa. dD/dt = r D (1 - D/K) scaled by the share of sealed brood; the often quoted action threshold is about 3 mites per 100 bees. Pollination. Visits per flower v in the 4-day receptive window give p_set = 1 - exp(-alpha v), alpha = 0.15; a forager trip visits about 50 flowers.

Honest simplifications. One hive, no swarming, genetics, robbing, defence behaviour or disease other than varroa, a single smooth nectar-flow curve and a fixed Sun/day length. All rates are typical textbook values rounded for teaching; check apiculture sources before using any number in practice. This is not a substitute for a local bee inspector. Models built with Blender (hive, frame, bees, flowers, beekeepers, terrain) and rendered with Three.js.