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🫀 Honey Bee Physiology Lab

A cutaway 3D honeybee revealing the dorsal heart tube, tracheal air network, ventral nerve cord and thorax shivering muscle working together, driven by activity and ambient-temperature controls.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DModerate60 FPS💨 Air & Wind

A cutaway 3D honeybee reveals the dorsal heart tube, the branching tracheal air network, the ventral nerve cord, and the thorax flight muscles that generate the colony's heat — all responding live to activity and temperature.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Bees run an open circulatory system alongside a completely separate respiratory system: a simple dorsal tube moves hemolymph while a network of tracheae carries oxygen straight to tissues. A ventral nerve cord of ganglia handles reflexes locally, and thoracic flight muscles can shiver out of sync to generate heat without flying.

🎮 How to Use

Raise activity level to see the heart rate and tracheal flutter speed up together. Lower ambient temperature to watch the thorax muscle glow hotter as it shivers to stay flight-ready. Use "Focus system" to isolate one system, and toggle the cutaway to see the tubes clearly.

💡 Did You Know?

A bee's flight muscles can hold the thorax near 35°C even when the air is close to freezing — the same shivering trick a winter cluster of thousands of bees uses to keep the whole colony alive.

⚙ Under the hood

A cutaway 3D honeybee model that exposes the dorsal heart tube, tracheal air network, ventral nerve cord and thorax flight muscles, with pulsing hemolymph, airflow and nerve-impulse markers that speed up or intensify as you raise activity level or drop ambient temperature.

bee-physiologyinsect-biologythermoregulationcirculatory-systemnervous-systementomology

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