Home▸Entomology & Insect Behaviour▸The Genetics Behind Honey Bee Colour Patterns

🐝 The Genetics Behind Honey Bee Colour Patterns

What determines whether a honey bee appears golden, dark leather-brown or banded grey, and why colour is an unreliable shortcut for identifying breed or predicting temperament.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DModerate60 FPS

What determines whether a honey bee appears golden, dark leather-brown or banded grey — and why colour is an unreliable shortcut for identifying breed or predicting temperament.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Each bee's cuticle colour is drawn from a population distribution shaped by melanism, banding, and race-baseline sliders, with independent random variation per bee — the same way a queen's many drone matings scatter colour genes across her colony.

🎮 How to Use

Move the melanism and banding sliders to shift the colony's colour distribution, pick a race baseline, and toggle the temperament overlay to see that behaviour genes are not linked to coat colour.

💡 Did You Know?

The "cordovan" honey bee is a single recessive mutation producing a uniform leather-red colour — yet cordovan colonies can be just as defensive or gentle as any differently coloured stock.

⚙ Under the hood

An interactive 3D swarm of instanced honey bees whose cuticle colour and abdominal banding are generated procedurally from melanism, banding and race-baseline sliders, showing how a single colony's polyandrous mating scatters colour genes across its workers — and that a separate temperament toggle proves coat colour is uncorrelated with defensiveness.

bee geneticscolour morphshoney bee racespigmentationidentificationmelanism

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