🐝 Conserving Rare and Heritage Honey Bee Breeds

About this simulation

Locally adapted breeds such as the native dark bee, Apis mellifera mellifera, survive today only where conservation apiaries keep them both large enough to stay genetically healthy and isolated enough to avoid being swamped by drones from commercial, hybrid colonies. This model shows a ring of heritage colonies (dark hives) surrounded by commercial apiaries (amber hives), with drones and queens meeting in a shared mating cloud overhead.

How it works

• Genetic purity falls when foreign drones from nearby commercial apiaries reach the mating cloud and mate with heritage queens; it recovers with distance or a protected mating station, compounded over the generations simulated.
• Genetic diversity and inbreeding risk depend on effective population size — too few conservation colonies means queens increasingly mate with related drones, raising the inbreeding coefficient over time.
• The mating cloud's colour blends from dark heritage brown toward amber as contamination rises; flickering red bees signal inbreeding depression in a small, isolated population.
• Real gene banks balance both risks: enough isolated mating stations to protect purity, and enough cooperating apiaries or cryopreserved semen/germplasm to keep the effective population large.

Controls

• Conservation colonies — number of heritage colonies in the protected apiary, driving effective population size.
• Isolation distance — distance to the nearest commercial apiary; farther means fewer foreign drones.
• Generations simulated — how many bee generations the scenario runs forward, compounding drift and cross-breeding effects.
• Controlled mating station — toggles a protected, drone-flooded mating site that filters out foreign drones almost entirely.

Did you know?

Some UK and European conservation groups combine live "black bee" reserves with frozen drone semen gene banks, so genetic diversity lost to a bad year in the field can later be reintroduced from cryopreserved stock.