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🐝🧠 Bee Swarm Decision-Making: Quorum Sensing in Action

Watch a honeybee swarm collectively choose a new nest site: scout bees explore candidate sites, dance to recruit nestmates in proportion to site quality, and the colony commits once one site reaches quorum — a live model of decentralised group decision-making.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour2DModerate60 FPS

A honeybee swarm has to choose a new home together, with no single bee in charge. This simulation models the real mechanism — scouts inspect candidate sites, dance in proportion to how good each one is, and the colony commits the instant enough scouts agree.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Scouts fly out from the swarm cluster to one of four candidate nest sites, evaluate it, then fly home and "dance" for longer at higher-quality sites — recruiting more nestmates and accelerating support for the best options through positive feedback, until one site reaches quorum and the whole swarm commits.

🎮 How to Use

Lower the quorum threshold for faster decisions, raise the exploration bias to see more scouts checking sites at random instead of following dances, and adjust dispatch rate and speed to slow the process down or speed it up. Use "New candidate sites" to reroll site quality at any time.

💡 Did You Know?

Real swarms of scout bees can evaluate dozens of potential nest cavities spread over several square kilometres, cross-checking each other's dances, and typically converge on the single best option without any individual bee ever having visited every candidate itself.

⚙ Under the hood

Three.jsbee-psychologycollective-behaviourquorum-sensingswarm-intelligencedecision-makingentomology

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install