🍯 Designing a Honey Processing Facility

About this simulation

This is a scaled-down 3D floor plan of a small honey processing workshop: frames come in from the apiary, move through uncapping, extraction, settling and filtering, then bottling, and finally into storage. A separate QC sampling branch and a wax/propolis side room sit off the main line. The amber spheres are batches of honey moving through the workflow in real time.

How it works

• One-way flow — good practice keeps "dirty" incoming frames and "clean" filtered honey moving in a single direction so finished product never crosses paths with unprocessed material. Switching hygiene flow to "Ignored" shows a red return path that violates this principle.
• Storage bays — honey, wax, propolis and pollen each need different temperature and humidity conditions. The storage room recolors from cool blue to warm red as you raise the slider, and the focused bay's status turns green or red depending on whether the current temperature suits that product.
• Throughput — more batches per hour means more honey spheres moving faster along the line, which is also when bottlenecks around extraction and filtering tend to appear in a real workshop.

Controls

• Batch throughput — sets how many batches per hour flow through the workshop.
• Storage temperature — sets the warehouse temperature (0–35°C).
• Product in focus — highlights the storage bay for honey, wax, propolis or pollen and shows its ideal range.
• One-way hygiene flow — toggles proper unidirectional flow versus a contaminating return path. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

Honey stored below about 10°C crystallizes far faster, while storage above roughly 27°C accelerates HMF formation and can push honey out of spec for export — most small producers aim to keep bulk honey around 10–21°C, cool, dark and dry.