Home▸Biology▸Bee Traits & Heritability: Selective Breeding Lab

🧬 Bee Traits & Heritability: Selective Breeding Lab

A 3D apiary breeding lab where you select breeder colonies generation after generation and watch how heritability sets the limit on genetic gain for temperament, honey yield, disease resistance and swarming tendency.

Biology3DAdvanced60 FPS

A 3D apiary of 100 instanced colonies where you requeen generation after generation, watching how heritability and selection strength together determine how far a trait can actually move.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Each hive's height and colour show its phenotype, split under the hood into a genetic breeding value and an environmental deviation. Selecting the gold-ringed top performers as breeders each round applies the breeder's equation R = h²S live.

🎮 How to Use

Pick a trait for its realistic starting heritability, then override h² and selection strength yourself. Click "Requeen next generation" or switch on auto-advance and watch the gain chart climb — quickly for high-h² traits, barely at all for low ones.

💡 Did You Know?

Because Mendelian sampling reshuffles genes every generation, genetic variance never fully disappears — which is exactly why breeding programmes keep making slow gains decade after decade instead of hitting a wall after one round of selection.

⚙ Under the hood

beesgeneticsbreedingheritabilityanimal-behaviorselective-breedingThree.js

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install