🧬 Genetic Diversity Conservation in Honey Bee Populations

About this simulation

The purple cluster of hives on the left is a native reserve holding a protected stock of dark European honey bee, Apis mellifera mellifera. The gold hives scattered across the wider landscape are ordinary commercial apiaries, typically stocked with imported queens of mixed or hybrid ancestry. Each hive's colour is a simplified stand-in for its genetic makeup — how "native purple" or "commercial gold" its queen's lineage is.

The two forces eroding diversity

• Gene flow / hybridisation — queens mate in mid-air with drones from any colony within flight range. Without control, drones from commercial apiaries fly in and mate with reserve queens, and the reserve's distinct colour is gradually swamped by commercial genetics — real-world genetic introgression.
• Genetic drift — even a fully isolated population still loses alleles by chance every generation, faster the smaller its effective population size (N_e). Small, "protected" populations can still become genetic bottlenecks.

Controls

• Colony population size (N_e) — effective breeding population. Smaller values make random genetic drift much stronger and noisier.
• Drone gene flow — how strongly outside genetics pull on every colony each generation, i.e. how far commercial drones range and how often they succeed at mating.
• Closed mating station — when on, the reserve is isolated: drones from outside are blocked at the boundary (shown bouncing off the fence) and reserve queens mate only within the reserve, exactly like a real island or valley mating station.
• Time controls — pause or fast-forward generations. Drag to rotate the camera, scroll to zoom.

Reading the numbers

• Native lineage purity — how close the reserve's average genetics still are to the original native type. Falls quickly if the station is open and gene flow is high.
• Reserve internal diversity — how much genetic variety remains inside the reserve itself. A very small N_e can drive this toward zero even with the station closed — isolation alone doesn't guarantee healthy diversity.
• Whole-area diversity — genetic variety across every colony, reserve and commercial combined.

Did you know?

UK conservation groups such as B4 (Bee Farmers for Biodiversity) and BIBBA maintain real closed mating apiaries on islands and in remote valleys specifically to keep Apis mellifera mellifera breeding true, because open mating with imported commercial queens is exactly this kind of one-way genetic swamping in the wild.