The UK hosts roughly 270 bee species; only one, the honeybee, is managed for honey. The other 269 — bumblebees and solitary bees — pollinate wildflowers and crops for free, and their fate depends entirely on the quality of the landscape they forage in. This sim drives an actual colony population model, not a decorative one.
Each bee instance you see flies real round trips from the hive to active flower patches. Landscape quality sets a foraging efficiency term F (habitat + hedgerow connectivity) and a mortality term m (pesticide exposure), which together integrate a logistic growth equation every frame:
F = clamp(0.35 + 0.9 · density · connectivity, 0, 1.25)
m = 0.02 + 0.30 · pesticide
dN/dt = r · N · (1 − N/K) · F − m · N
r = 0.14 /day, K = 320 bees
pollination rate ≈ min(1, F) · 100%
forage success = successful trips / total trips
- Flower / habitat density — sets how many flower patches are in bloom, raising foraging efficiency F.
- Pesticide exposure — raises the daily mortality rate m applied to the whole colony.
- Hedgerow connectivity — multiplies with density in F; fragmented landscapes without linking hedgerows waste foraging energy even where flowers exist.
- Presets — jump to real-world land-use archetypes; Reset colony restarts the population at N=50.
This is the mechanism behind neonicotinoid bans, agri-environment wildflower-margin schemes, and hedgerow-restoration grants: small changes to F and m compound daily into large swings in colony viability and the pollination service bees provide to wild plants and food crops.