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🌡️ 35°C or Bust: How Honeybees Regulate Hive Temperature

A 3D cutaway beehive where you control outside temperature, fanning-bee numbers and water-forager supply to see whether the colony holds its 35°C brood nest — or overheats.

Biology & Life3DModerate60 FPS

A 3D cutaway of a beehive showing how the colony acts as a single superorganism to hold its brood nest at a stable ~35°C — clustering and shivering when it's cold, fanning and evaporatively cooling with water when it's hot.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

How fanning bees, water foragers and colony size interact to counteract outside heat, and how clustering counteracts cold — plus what happens to brood-nest temperature when cooling capacity runs out of water.

🎮 How to Use

Set the outside temperature, the number of fanning bees, water supply, and colony size, then watch the brood-nest temperature readout and the 3D hive respond with fanning, mist, foraging flights or a tightening winter cluster.

💡 Did You Know?

A strong colony can bring in litres of water on a hot day purely for evaporative cooling — cut that supply and brood-nest temperature can spike into the danger zone within hours, even with full fanning effort.

⚙ Under the hood

An interactive 3D cutaway beehive where you tune outside temperature, fanning-bee count, water supply and colony size to see the colony cluster, fan or evaporatively cool its brood nest in real time.

thermoregulationwater-foragingsuperorganismbrood-developmenthive-physiology

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