🐝 Rainwater Harvesting Systems for Apiaries

About this simulation

A colony can drink 1–4 litres of water a week in summer, and a reliable, clean, close-by water source keeps foragers from visiting swimming pools, livestock troughs or neighbours' gardens. This model shows the whole chain: rain falling on a catchment roof, running down a gutter and downspout, passing through an optional first-flush diverter that discards the dirtiest initial runoff, filling a storage tank, and finally gravity-feeding a float-valve hive waterer stocked with landing pebbles so bees can drink without drowning.

How it works

• Collection rate — modelled as Rainfall (mm/h) × Roof area (m²) × 0.85 runoff efficiency, giving litres per hour.
• First-flush diverter — when enabled, the first ~2 litres per 10m² of roof area of every storm are skimmed off before water reaches the tank, removing pollen, dust, and bird droppings from the roof surface.
• Tank level — rises with collection rate and falls with colony consumption; colonies draw roughly 2.5L/week each in the model, faster in "storm" conditions of higher intensity.
• Days of hive supply — how long the current tank volume could supply all colonies at their average draw rate with zero further rain.

Controls

• Rainfall intensity — millimetres of rain per hour hitting the roof (0 = dry, 40 = heavy downpour).
• Roof catchment area — size of the collecting roof surface in square metres.
• Tank capacity — storage tank size in litres.
• Colony count — number of hives drawing from the system.
• First-flush diverter — toggle the pollutant-skimming first-flush stage on or off.
• ↺ Reset tank — empties the tank and restarts. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

A single 30m² apiary shed roof in a modest 600mm/year rainfall climate can theoretically collect over 15,000 litres annually — far more than even a large apiary of 40 colonies would ever drink, which is why the limiting factor is almost always storage and filtration, not catchment area.