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🐝 Beehive Colony: Agent-Based Model

Thousands of individually-simulated bees nurse brood, forage a flower field, guard the entrance and thermoregulate the hive — watch a honeybee superorganism emerge from simple, role-based agent behaviour.

Biology & Life3DAdvanced60 FPS

Thousands of individually-simulated bees nurse brood, forage a flower field, guard the entrance and thermoregulate the hive — a honeybee colony rendered as a genuine agent-based model, where colony-wide behaviour emerges from simple, role-based rules followed by each bee.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

No single bee runs the colony. Each agent follows a handful of rules tied to its role — nurse, forager, guard, builder, thermoregulator or scout — and the colony-level patterns we recognise, like a warm brood nest and full honey stores, emerge purely from thousands of those small decisions adding up.

🎮 How to Use

Set the target population, pick a season, and drag the forager-ratio slider to see how the balance of roles shifts honey stores, brood coverage and swarm pressure. Flip on disease pressure to watch a Varroa-style stressor erode colony vitality, and use the speed buttons to fast-forward through whole seasons.

💡 Did You Know?

A strong summer colony can hold 40,000–60,000 bees, yet it keeps its brood nest within about two degrees of 35°C purely through collective fanning and clustering — one of nature's clearest examples of decentralised, "superorganism" self-regulation.

⚙ Under the hood

Bee agents are rendered with THREE.InstancedMesh (a single draw call per role group) rather than one mesh per bee, so the scene stays fast even with thousands of visible agents; populations above the render cap continue to update on aggregate ("statistical mode"). A lightweight tick loop — decoupled from the render frame rate — advances resources, brood coverage, a composite Colony Vitality Index and a swarm-pressure meter once per simulated second, and periodically repaints the hex-comb canvas texture so the brood/honey/pollen zones visibly reflect the colony's current state.

agent-based-modelhoneybee-colonysuperorganismthermoregulationswarm-dynamics

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