🐝 Hive Simulator · Alleman Apiary

Build a hive, set your queen, schedule mites & disease, and watch brood and honey rise and fall over a season.

Scenarios

Shares this exact hive setup as a link.

Hive Boxes

Starting Colony

Queen

Real queens peak around 1,500–2,000 eggs/day in late spring.

Timing & Location

Default: Harrisburg, PA. Affects modeled weather & season.

Weather & Forage

Using modeled seasonal weather.
Scales the seasonal nectar/pollen flow (spring build, summer dearth, fall flow).

Starting Health

Diseases & Pests

Introduce a disease on a chosen day — watch the workforce and honey react.

Hazards

Pesticide exposure — a nearby spray drifts onto your bees. Kills foragers and lingers.

Mite Treatments

Schedule a treatment. Real-world kill depends on temperature, brood, and whether supers are on.

Management

Scheduled Timeline

Compare Hives (A/B/C)

Run up to 3 hives head-to-head. They share every setting above — only the stock & treatment differ, so it's a fair experiment.

Bee Yard

A whole yard where mites drift between hives — one neglected colony can mite-bomb its neighbors.
Day 0 ＋ hover/drag on charts
One brood frame ▸ Capped brood Larvae & eggs Drone brood Pollen Capped honey Empty comb Dead/spotty brood
Whole brood box ▸ frames side by side — the brood nest fills the center, honey on the outside frames
Adult bees Brood
Honey (lbs) Mite load (%)
Brood Honey Empty comb
Daily high °F Forage flow Foraging days
About the model & assumptions
This is an educational approximation, not a validated scientific model — great for "what if" exploration, not regulatory decisions. Key assumptions:
  • Worker development: egg→emergence in 21 days. Brood tracked as daily cohorts.
  • Adult lifespan ~38 days in active season, much longer for winter bees (low brood-rearing).
  • Foraging only when modeled high temp ≥ 55°F and it's not a rain day.
  • Seasonal nectar flow: spring build, early-summer dearth, fall (goldenrod) flow, winter zero.
  • Comb: deep frame ≈ 6,000 brood cells or ≈5 lbs honey; medium ≈ 4,000 cells or ≈3.5 lbs. Brood only in deeps.
  • Varroa grows with capped brood and amplifies virus; high loads shorten lifespan & kill brood.
  • Queenless colonies stop laying; without requeening the colony dwindles.
  • Diseases each carry an infection level (0–1) that progresses, is modulated by weather/colony strength, and can self-clear (except AFB). Each hits some mix of brood survival, adult lifespan, foraging, and laying — so you see the workforce and honey react.
  • DWV is tied to your varroa load — knock down mites and it fades.
  • Mite treatments have a peak knockdown that's degraded by being out of temperature range, by capped brood (for contact-only products like oxalic acid), and some (formic acid) can set back the queen/brood in heat. The summary reports the realized kill.
  • Small hive beetle & wax moth are modeled as weak-colony pests — they surge and bite harder the weaker the colony, and strong colonies clean them up.
  • Varroa economic thresholds: 2 mites/100 in spring–summer, 3/100 in the critical Aug–Sep window. Mite load is also shown as a per-300-bee wash, the way you'd actually sample it.
  • Bee stock matters: each genetic line adjusts spring buildup, varroa growth, hygienic mite removal (VSH), winter hardiness, swarminess and thrift — so a mite-resistant stock can hold varroa down on its own.
  • Starting type (overwintered / nuc / package / swarm) sets your bees, brood, stores, queen age and how much comb is drawn. Undrawn comb caps laying & storage until the bees build it out — why a package is slow at first.
  • Drones are reared Apr–Aug (~5% of bees at peak), take 24 days, and are evicted in fall. Varroa strongly prefer drone brood, so drones speed up the mite build — and drone-comb removal is a real IPM tool.
  • Swarming fires when a strong colony gets crowded in May–Jul (it leaves with the old queen and ~55% of the bees, then has a brood break); a worn-out old queen is superseded; and you can split a colony as a brood-break mite control.
  • The brood-frame view is a representative central frame: a capped-brood nest with a dappled core of young larvae/eggs, a pollen ring, and a honey arc on top — the classic "rainbow." It turns spotty/shotgun (and shows mites) exactly when brood is actually dying, and goes queenless (no eggs) if the queen is lost.
  • The brood-box strip shows every frame side by side — the brood nest is weighted to the center frames and honey to the outer frames, the way a box looks when you fan it open. Hit ▶ Play season to watch it all change day by day.
  • Compare Hives runs up to three colonies on the same boxes, dates, weather and forage — only the stock & treatment differ — so you can put genetics and IPM head-to-head as a controlled experiment.
  • Pesticide hazards (spray drift / direct kill) kill foragers outright on the day they hit, then leave a sublethal load that fades over ~2 weeks — extra adult/brood loss and weaker foraging.
  • The honey-value estimate multiplies your harvestable surplus (anything over a 40 lb winter reserve) by your $/lb — shown in the summary and in the compare table.
  • The Bee Yard runs several hives together and lets mites drift between them: a high-mite or collapsing colony sheds mites (a dead-out gets robbed) that raise its neighbors' loads — a rough model of how one neglected hive mite-bombs the yard. Even a well-treated hive can pick up extra mites from a bad neighbor.
Sources: treatment efficacy/temperature figures from the Honey Bee Health Coalition Tools for Varroa Management; disease symptoms & the Northeast management calendar from the Cornell Master Beekeeping course materials.