Home▸Entomology & Insect Behaviour▸Honeybee Swarm: Nest-Site Decision Lab

🐝 Honeybee Swarm: Nest-Site Decision Lab

A 3D honeybee swarm cluster where scout bees inspect candidate nest cavities, dance to recruit nestmates, and build a quorum before the whole swarm relocates.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DAdvanced60 FPS

A swarm cluster hangs from a branch while scout bees fly out to candidate tree cavities, dance to recruit nestmates to the best sites they find, and build a quorum before the whole swarm relocates together.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Better sites earn longer, more vigorous dances, which recruit more scouts, which produce more dances — a positive-feedback vote that converges on the best available cavity without any bee comparing sites directly.

🎮 How to Use

Set how many sites are competing, how much better the best one is, and how many scouts must agree before liftoff. Watch each site's orange vote bar race toward the quorum line.

💡 Did You Know?

Thomas Seeley's island experiments showed swarms reliably choose the best of several nest boxes even when scouts start out split between them — collective intelligence beating any individual bee's judgement.

⚙ Under the hood

A 3D honeybee swarm cluster where scout bees inspect candidate nest cavities, dance to recruit nestmates, and build a quorum before the whole swarm relocates.

beesswarmnestingbehaviorsimulation3danimalsThree.js

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