Home▸Ecology & Conservation Biology▸Gene Banks and Genetic Conservation for Honey Bees

🧊 Gene Banks and Genetic Conservation for Honey Bees

Why narrowing genetic diversity threatens honey bee resilience, and how in situ breeding populations, cryopreserved semen banks, and native stock conservation work to preserve it.

Ecology & Conservation Biology3DModerate60 FPS

A native breeding population loses haplotypes to genetic drift generation after generation, while a cryopreservation gene bank beside it keeps every founder lineage frozen and ready to reintroduce — inseminate to watch diversity recover.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Each hive's colour is one of ten founder haplotypes. Smaller effective population sizes accelerate random loss of haplotypes (genetic drift), while the cryobank's frozen semen straws never drift — they preserve the full original diversity indefinitely.

🎮 How to Use

Lower the population size slider to watch diversity collapse faster, then use the insemination button (or enable auto top-up) to send a beam of thawed samples from the vault into the reserve and see lost haplotypes reappear on the live chart.

💡 Did You Know?

Real programmes like the USDA-ARS honey bee germplasm repository cryopreserve drone semen in liquid nitrogen so that rare, locally-adapted genetics can be reintroduced decades later, long after they might otherwise have vanished from living colonies.

⚙ Under the hood

An instanced honeycomb population of native bees loses founder haplotypes to genetic drift over simulated generations, while a liquid-nitrogen cryobank vault holds the full original diversity and can be drawn on to reintroduce lost lineages, restoring a live Shannon-diversity index.

genetic-diversitygene-bankcryopreservationnative-beesbreeding-programmesgenetic-drift

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