🧊 Gene Banks and Genetic Conservation for Honey Bees

About this simulation

On the left is an in situ breeding population — a conservation apiary of native Apis mellifera mellifera colonies, each hive coloured by which of ten founder haplotypes (genetic lineages) its queen carries. On the right is a cryopreservation gene bank: a liquid-nitrogen vault holding straws of drone semen frozen from the original, more diverse founder stock — a frozen safety net for diversity the living population may since have lost.

Why diversity narrows on its own

• Genetic drift — every generation, only a sample of queens and drones actually reproduce. In a small breeding population that random sampling can eliminate a haplotype entirely by chance, even if it was doing no harm — the smaller the effective population size (N_e), the faster this "genetic bottleneck" effect erodes variety.
• Once a haplotype is lost from every living colony, it is gone for good — unless it was preserved somewhere else first.

What the gene bank does

• Real conservation programmes cryopreserve drone semen in liquid nitrogen at around −196°C, keeping haplotypes viable for years or decades after they might otherwise vanish from the living population.
• Inseminating queens with thawed, banked semen reintroduces haplotypes the reserve has lost, restoring diversity without needing to import outside (and potentially non-native) genetics.

Controls

• Breeding population size (N_e) — smaller values make genetic drift much stronger and faster; larger, well-managed populations lose diversity more slowly.
• Auto top-up toggle — automatically inseminates from the bank every 15 generations, like a scheduled conservation programme.
• 🧊 Inseminate with cryobank sample — manually draws on the bank right now, spreading a beam of thawed samples into the reserve.
• Time controls — pause or fast-forward generations. Drag to rotate the camera, scroll to zoom.

Reading the numbers

• Population diversity — a Shannon-diversity index of the ten haplotypes actually present in living colonies right now, as a share of the maximum possible.
• Haplotypes alive — how many of the original ten founder lineages still survive anywhere in the reserve.
• Bank reserve diversity — the gene bank's frozen stock never drifts; all ten haplotypes stay preserved indefinitely, ready to be reintroduced.

Did you know?

Programmes such as the USDA-ARS honey bee germplasm repository and several European conservation projects for native subspecies now cryopreserve drone semen specifically so that rare, locally-adapted genetics are never permanently lost to drift, disease bottlenecks, or a single bad winter.