🍯 Single vs Double Brood Box Management

About this simulation

Two identical colonies are shown side by side: the left hive is kept on a single Langstroth deep brood box (10 frames), the right hive on two stacked deep boxes (20 frames). Both hold the exact same population slider value — only the amount of comb space available to that population differs. Everything else in the simulation (comb congestion, queen-cell formation, honey stores and winter survival) is derived purely from how tightly the same number of bees is packed into the available frames.

What you're seeing

• Comb heatmap — each frame's face is tinted by content: amber/orange for brood, gold for capped honey, pale wax for empty drawn comb. A red overlay creeps in once a box is more than ~85% full.
• Swarm (queen) cells — small peanut-shaped cells appear along the bottom bars once a box is congested. Bees raise queen cells and prepare to swarm when the nest feels overcrowded — the single box reaches that threshold at roughly half the population the double box needs.
• Winter cluster — in winter the flying bees disappear and a tight thermoregulating cluster forms inside the top box instead, shown as a dense ball of bees drawing on the stores directly around it.
• Foragers — small groups of bees circle each entrance in the growing season; activity is roughly proportional to population.

Controls

• Colony population — the same number of bees is applied to both hives at once, so you can see how identical colonies fare in different box configurations.
• Season — shifts the brood/honey/empty-comb balance and switches winter behaviour on.
• Highlight swarm cells / Comb heatmap — toggle the two visual overlays independently.
• Drag to rotate the camera, scroll to zoom, and use ↺ Reset view to return to the default framing.

Why it matters

A single deep box gives a beekeeper a lighter, faster, cheaper-to-inspect hive with less risk of missing a queen cell buried in a second storey — but it hits its comb-space ceiling sooner, raising swarm risk during a strong spring flow and leaving less room to bank the honey stores a colony needs to survive winter. A double box roughly doubles both the safety margin and the inspection time. Neither configuration is "correct" — it is a trade-off between swarm control, wintering security, honey yield and the beekeeper's own time and back.