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🧠 Bee Neuroscience: Learning & Navigation Lab

An interactive mushroom-body learning circuit and sun-compass path-integration flight, side by side in one 3D scene showing how a bee's tiny brain learns and finds its way home.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DAdvanced60 FPS💨 Air & Wind

A honey bee's mushroom-body learning circuit on one side, and a sun-compass foraging flight with live path integration on the other — two of the tiniest brains' biggest tricks, rendered side by side.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Sparse Kenyon-cell coding of odors, dopamine-gated single-trial learning of approach/avoidance weights, and a foraging bee that integrates every leg of its outbound flight into a home vector it flies in a straight line.

🎮 How to Use

Pick an odor and toggle the reward, then run training trials and watch the approach/avoidance bars shift. Drag the sun-azimuth slider to see the whole outbound flight path reorient around the sun's new position.

💡 Did You Know?

A honey bee's brain has roughly one million neurons — about 170,000 of them Kenyon cells in the mushroom bodies — yet it can form a durable memory from a single rewarded exposure to a new scent.

⚙ Under the hood

A split 3D scene pairing a simplified mushroom-body associative-learning circuit (odor → sparse Kenyon-cell code → approach/avoidance output) with a sun-compass path-integration foraging flight, letting visitors train an odor memory and rotate the sun to see the flight path reorient.

bee brainmushroom bodiesassociative learningsun compassbee navigationinsect neuroscience

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