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🧠 How Bees Think: Learning, Memory and Navigation in a Millimetre-Sized Brain

How honey bees learn associations, form memories, and navigate using the sun and landmarks, and what this reveals about cognition in very small nervous systems.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DModerate60 FPS

A single foraging bee repeatedly visits patches of coloured flowers; only one colour hides real nectar, and with each trip her associative memory for every colour updates, letting you watch simple learning and forgetting unfold live.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Each visit reinforces or weakens a colour association following a Rescorla–Wagner-style update rule, while unused associations quietly decay — a minimal model of how a brain of under a million neurons still learns fast and remembers selectively.

🎮 How to Use

Pick the rewarded colour, tune the learning rate and forgetting rate, and watch the association bars rise for the profitable flower and fade for the rest. Flip on extinction test to see a learned preference collapse once the reward disappears.

💡 Did You Know?

Real honey bees can be trained in the lab using the proboscis extension reflex (PER) — after just a few pairings of an odour with sugar water, they reflexively extend their tongue to that odour alone, a textbook demonstration of associative learning in insects.

⚙ Under the hood

A 3D Three.js scene where a bee makes repeated foraging trips between a hive and four coloured flower patches, updating a live Rescorla-Wagner-style associative memory for each colour so you can watch learning, extinction and forgetting play out visually.

bee-cognitioninsect-learningbee-memorynavigationentomologyanimal-behaviour

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