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🍯 Autumn Feeding and Winter Stores Lab

How and when to feed heavy syrup in autumn so UK colonies go into winter with adequate capped stores.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DModerate60 FPS❄️ Ice & Cold

A hive cutaway shows heavy syrup being taken down through a feeder and converted into capped winter stores on the comb, racing against the closing autumn window before the first hard frost.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Stores build up from feeding minus the colony's own consumption, and once the frost deadline passes the bees cluster and effectively stop taking syrup down — whatever is capped by then is what they overwinter on.

🎮 How to Use

Set the heavy syrup feeding rate, colony strength, days remaining until first frost, and syrup concentration. Watch the frames fill with capped stores and see whether the colony reaches its target before the window closes.

💡 Did You Know?

UK colonies typically need 18–23kg of capped stores to survive winter — feeding too little, too late, or too dilute a syrup are among the most common causes of spring starvation.

⚙ Under the hood

A 3D hive cutaway with instanced hex-cell frames that fill from empty comb to capped gold stores as a heavy-syrup feeding model races against a closing autumn frost deadline, with cooling light and falling leaves marking the season.

autumn feedingwinter storesheavy syrupuk beekeepinghive management

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