A honey bee colony sits inside a much wider web of wildlife. Some visitors — insect-eating songbirds, ladybugs, hoverflies — quietly reduce the pests that would otherwise stress a hive or its surrounding plants. Others — hive-raiding hornets, shrikes that pick off foraging bees, and mice that overwinter in an unguarded box — are a direct cost to the colony. This scene lets you swap between five common visitors and see how each one actually behaves around a hive.
A single Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) can capture dozens of bees a day by hawking outside a hive entrance, and colonies under sustained attack sometimes stop foraging entirely — a behaviour beekeepers call "entrance paralysis."
A 3D apiary yard where foraging bees fly between the hive and surrounding flowers while five real-world visitors — a pest-eating chickadee, a predatory shrike, a winter field mouse, an Asian hornet, and garden ladybugs — take turns showing how they actually interact with the colony.
Each visitor follows its own real behaviour: allies forage on pests near the apiary without touching the hive, while predators stoop on flying foragers or hover at the entrance — and an entrance reducer measurably cuts their success rate.
Pick a visitor from the dropdown, slide time of day toward night to see nocturnal mice appear while birds settle, adjust how many individuals are present, and toggle the entrance reducer to see it block mice and blunt hornet and shrike strikes.
A simple wooden entrance reducer is one of the cheapest, most effective defences a beekeeper has — it is too narrow for a mouse to squeeze through and gives a handful of guard bees a single doorway to defend against hornets.