Honey bees are exposed to agricultural sprays in two main ways: direct overspray while foraging on a flowering crop, and drift — spray droplets carried by wind onto nearby hedgerows, wildflowers or hives. This scene models a flowering crop being sprayed next to an apiary, with foraging bees flying between the hive and the crop through a no-spray buffer strip.
UK pesticide stewardship guidance (and product labels for bee-attractive crops) asks growers to avoid spraying insecticides on open flowers when bees are foraging, to spray in the evening once foraging has stopped, and to leave unsprayed margins — exactly the levers this simulation lets you pull.
A 3D flowering crop next to an apiary shows how spray dose, wind drift, buffer zone width and time of spraying combine to change how many foraging bees pick up sublethal or lethal pesticide exposure.
Bees foraging directly on a sprayed crop receive near-full concentration; bees in the buffer strip receive an exponentially decaying drift dose that depends on wind speed and buffer width. Cumulative exposure pushes bees from normal flight to disoriented "sublethal" wobbling to acute collapse.
Adjust spray timing, dose, wind and buffer width, or click "Apply IPM best practice" to see the evening-spray, low-dose, wide-buffer combination UK guidance recommends. Watch the forager count, sublethal and acute-loss stats update live.
Because foraging activity collapses after dusk, simply moving a spray application from midday to evening can remove most of the bees that would otherwise ever contact the product — no change in chemistry required.