🐝 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.

Challenges

Pick a goal, then use treatments, requeening and management to hit it. Re-run after each change.

Hive Boxes

Starting Colony

Queen

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

Timing & Location

Push past a year to run multiple seasons (overwintering & spring rebuild).
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.

⏱ Treatment Timing Lab

The same colony and the same product, treated on three different dates plus an untreated control — so you can see why when you treat matters as much as whether you treat.

Bee Yard

A whole yard where mites drift between hives — one neglected colony can mite-bomb its neighbors.

My Hive Log

Log your real mite-wash counts to overlay them (white dots) on the charts vs the model's prediction.
🔮 Make a prediction before you run
Guess how the colony ends up, lock it in, then run — and see how close you were. Best used before you change one thing and re-run.
Nothing predicted yet.
Day 0 ＋ tap/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
Hive entrance ▸ live forager traffic — busy on warm flow days, quiet & clustered when it's cold
Adult bees Brood
Honey (lbs) Mite load (%)
Brood Honey Empty comb
Daily high °F Forage flow Foraging days
📖 Beekeeping glossary — the terms used here
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 ~42 days in the active season, but months for winter bees. Winter (diutinus) bees are induced by shortening daylength + low brood rearing in fall — the model computes true daylight hours from your latitude (Forsythe daylength model).
  • Laying is cued by photoperiod (lengthening days in spring, shortening in fall) as well as temperature, flow and pollen — which is why buildup and shutdown happen on schedule even in an odd-weather year.
  • 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 is modeled as a true mite population (count), not a fixed rate (VarroaPop-style): mites reproduce only inside capped brood, drone cells yield ~2× the offspring of worker cells, growth is density-dependent (saturates as mites catch up to available cells), and the reported mites/100-bees is derived from the live bee count — so a shrinking colony concentrates its mites (the "mite bomb"), a feedback the old rate model couldn't show. A phoretic fraction (mites riding on bees vs sealed in brood) sets how much of the population a contact treatment can actually reach. High loads amplify DWV, 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.
  • My Hive Log lets you record your real mite-wash counts (and bee estimates) by date; they overlay as white dots on the charts and show the model's predicted value on that date, so you can see how your actual hive compares to the simulation.
  • Multi-year: push the day slider past a year to run several seasons — the colony overwinters and rebuilds each spring. Tick "repeat events every year" to apply an annual management regimen, and the summary breaks results down year by year. Note: without consistent, well-timed mite control, varroa wins within a year or two — and an un-requeened colony slowly declines as its queen ages (requeen to counter it).
  • Challenges set a goal (a honey target, rescuing a mite-bomb hive, getting winter-ready, surviving a spray). Pick one, then use treatments, requeening and management to hit it — the result banner tells you if you passed and by how much.
  • The hive-entrance animation shows live forager traffic for the day you're viewing — busy when it's warm and the flow is on, quiet and clustered when it's cold or raining. Hit ▶ Play season and watch the traffic rise and fall with the seasons.
  • Uncertainty band (🎲): tick it and the model re-runs your exact plan 25× with randomized weather (temperature & rain), then shades the 10th–90th-percentile range on the population & honey charts and reports how many runs survived. A season is probabilistic — the same plan can win or lose on the weather, and a wide band tells you the plan is fragile.
  • Under the hood: the coach box shows which of three ceilings — the queen's own potential, available nurse bees, or open drawn comb — is actually limiting laying on the day you're viewing (the queen can only lay the lowest of the three), plus the day's daylight hours.
  • The story of this colony: after each run the model reads its own output back as a plain-English timeline — buildup, mite threshold crossings, DWV, swarms, treatments, the winter-bee switch and any collapse — so the cause-and-effect chain is spelled out, not left to interpret from the charts.
  • Treatment Timing Lab: runs the same colony with the same product treated on three different dates (plus an untreated control) so you can see that when you treat — especially hitting the Aug–Sep window before the winter bees are reared — matters as much as which product you use.
  • Predict-then-reveal (🔮): lock in a guess for peak honey, ending bees and survival before you run, and the model scores how close you were — a simple way to test and sharpen your intuition.
Sources: treatment efficacy/temperature figures & the 1–2%/100-bee treatment threshold from the Honey Bee Health Coalition Tools for Varroa Management 9th Edition (2026); disease symptoms & the Northeast management calendar from the Cornell Master Beekeeping course materials. The varroa population dynamics follow the concepts of the USDA VarroaPop model (DeGrandi-Hoffman & Curry) — reproduction in capped brood with a drone-cell preference and a phoretic phase; daylength uses the Forsythe (1995) CBM model. Coefficients are tuned for educational realism, not laboratory precision.