Honey bees

Bee Foraging / Recruitment

Watch scouts explore, discover, and draw others toward promising food sources. Over time, the hive shifts its attention as simple local choices become a shared direction.

Watch a colony choose without a central plan

Scouts leave the hive in loose paths. When nectar is found, returning bees make that source more likely to attract the next departures.

What to watch: richer flowers glow and receive more traffic as recruitment turns scattered discovery into shared attention.

Explanatory notes

A few scouts keep wandering even after good food is found, so the colony can notice alternatives.
Returning foragers add a soft recruitment signal at the hive; richer patches strengthen that signal faster.
More bees visit sources with stronger signals, making colony attention visible as traffic and glow.
No bee sees the full plan. The shared direction appears through many small choices made at the hive and in the field.

Observe

Scouts explore from the hive. When a bee finds nectar, its return strengthens a local signal that draws more nestmates toward richer sources.

Controls

Preset

Explore the colony

The exhibit keeps the biology simple: good discoveries create stronger invitations, and bees still leave room for new searches.

Scout: Some bees leave the hive with no target and gently sample the meadow.
Discover: A scout that reaches nectar returns home with a signal linked to that source.
Recruit: Departing bees are more likely to visit sources with stronger recent signals.
Agree: Attention shifts gradually as repeated local choices favour richer flowers.

Visual overlays

Reveal recruitment cues while keeping the default view soft and readable.

Recruitment lines and pulses Source attention labels

Advanced tuning

Bee population90 More bees make colony attention easier to see, while fewer bees keep the field quieter. Exploration randomness0.32 Higher values keep more scouts searching instead of following the strongest current signal. Recruitment strength0.75 How strongly successful returns invite other bees toward the same nectar source. Nectar richness1 Raises or lowers all source rewards while preserving the differences between flowers. Source count4 Change how many nectar patches are available in the meadow.

Applications

Resource allocation
Load balancing
Search strategy design
Adaptive scheduling