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🐝 Designing Rigorous Field Trials for Apiary Research

Assign apiary colonies to treatment and control across a field with an environmental gradient, and see how randomization, blocking and haphazard placement change confounding.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DAdvanced60 FPS

A grid of apiary colonies sits on a field with a hidden forage gradient; switch between randomization schemes and watch how confounding between treatment and environment appears or disappears.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Completely randomized and randomized-block designs keep the correlation between treatment assignment and the environmental gradient near zero; a haphazard design that follows the gradient produces a confounded comparison.

🎮 How to Use

Pick a grid size and allocation design, set the treatment share, then re-randomize. Watch the confounding index and mean gradient gap respond, and toggle the gradient or block-boundary overlays to see why blocking helps.

💡 Did You Know?

Randomized block designs, introduced by Ronald Fisher for agricultural field trials in the 1920s, remain the standard way apiary researchers control for uneven forage, wind and sun exposure across an apiary site.

⚙ Under the hood

Assign apiary colonies to treatment and control across a field with an environmental gradient, and see how randomization, blocking and haphazard placement change confounding.

beeshivefield trialsresearchrandomizationblockingThree.js

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