Beekeeping looks very different depending on where in the world you practise it. This lab places four representative apiary stations side by side — a UK National hive apiary, a US Langstroth migratory pallet yard, a French Warré-style apiary, and a Kenyan top-bar apiary — so you can compare hive design, apiary scale, legal spacing rules and migratory practice at a glance.
Cold, wet UK winters favour tall, well-insulated National hive stacks; the vast almond and citrus pollination contracts of the US favour standardised, stackable Langstroth boxes that survive being forklifted onto trucks; French apiculture still uses a lot of vertical Warré-style hives built around the "bee space" philosophy; and in much of Kenya, low-cost horizontal top-bar hives dominate because they need no milled lumber, no extractor and no imported foundation wax.
In the United States, an estimated 1.5–2 million colonies are trucked into California each February for almond pollination alone — the largest managed pollination event on Earth. The UK, by contrast, has no legal minimum distance between hives at all; siting is governed mostly by the informal "Bee Farmers'" good-neighbour code rather than statute.
Four apiary stations — the UK, USA, France and Kenya — sit side by side in one 3D scene, each with its region-typical hive design, so you can pick a country and instantly compare hive shape, apiary scale, legal spacing and migratory practice.
Hive architecture is shaped by climate, cost and commercial scale: stacked National/Langstroth boxes in the UK and US, tapering Warré-style hives in France, and low-cost horizontal top-bar hives in Kenya — plus how migratory pollination trucking dominates in the US but is rare elsewhere.
Choose a region to fly the camera to that apiary and read its snapshot stats. Drag colony activity to change how many bees are foraging, toggle migratory transport to watch a pallet truck load and move hives, and toggle the regulation ring to see typical spacing/registration rules.
Roughly 1.5–2 million US colonies are trucked into California every February for almond pollination — the single largest managed pollination event on the planet — while the UK has no statutory minimum distance between hives at all.