🐝 How Honeybee Colonies Reproduce: Swarming

About this simulation

When a colony outgrows its hive, it raises a new queen and roughly half the workers depart with the old queen as a swarm. The swarm does not fly straight to a new home — it first settles into a temporary bivouac cluster on a branch while a few hundred scout bees search the surrounding area for hollow cavities to nest in.

How the vote works

• Scouts fly out from the cluster to inspect candidate sites, then return and perform a waggle dance whose vigour is proportional to how good the site is.
• Uncommitted scouts watch these dances and are recruited to follow up on the most enthusiastically advertised sites — a positive feedback loop.
• Better sites are evaluated faster and danced for more strongly, so they accumulate committed scouts quicker (biased quorum sensing, as described by Seeley & Buhrman).
• Once roughly 10–20 scouts have independently committed to the same site — a quorum — the whole cluster warms up and flies there together.

Controls

• Scout bees — how many bees are searching and voting.
• Site A / B quality — cavity volume, entrance size and dryness rolled into one score; higher quality sites get discovered as "better" faster and recruit more strongly.
• Quorum threshold — how many committed scouts are needed before the swarm accepts a decision and moves.
• ↺ Restart vote — resets scouts and vote counts. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

Thomas Seeley's decades of field experiments showed that swarms almost always choose the best available site, even when scouts start out split between several options — a form of collective decision-making comparable to neurons voting inside a brain.