An interactive model of a honeybee colony
A colony cannot move. Everything it will eat this year is already growing within three miles of it.
One colony. Twelve months. Nothing staged.
Coming to the App Store. For iPhone and iPad, iOS 18 or later.
How it works
Underneath is one simulation: bees, brood, comb, pollen, honey, daylight, temperature, and what is in flower that week. Everything you read is a consequence of it.
Drones are thrown out in autumn because the food arithmetic turns against them, not because a calendar said September. A midsummer gap in the forage appears on a badly sited hive and simply does not exist on a good one. No part of the app knows what month it is supposed to be dramatic in.
A full year solves in about two milliseconds, so the moment you change anything, the whole year runs again.
Three ways in
The home screen is a piece of comb with three cells open in it. They are three scales of the same colony, and none of them is a menu of topics.
The hive year
Scrub across twelve months and read the nest as a cross section: brood in the middle, beebread around it, ripening nectar and capped honey above. Bees are drawn under scale on purpose, because a real summer frame is wall to wall bees with no comb visible, which is true and useless.
Mini lessons
Eight lessons, about a minute each. Most of them run the same live colony as the rest of the app, so the chart inside a lesson is not an illustration of the argument. It is the argument, and you can change it and watch the answer change.
The bee lens
Pick a day and follow the worker born on it. She cleans, then nurses, then builds, then flies, because her glands mature in that order. Whether she sees October is the colony's arithmetic, not a script.
What you decide
First, where the hive stands: an old hedgerow, four hundred hectares of a single crop, or three hundred suburban gardens. Each landscape has its own shape of year, and the shape matters more than the total. A field can be generous in May and still lose its colonies.
Then the conditions it lives under: how far north it sits, a hollow tree or a hive, how much sun and shelter. Forty litres is how bees house themselves and it fills by midsummer, so a colony with nowhere left to put anything swarms. Sun buys an early spring and charges for it every night of the winter. None of the options is the better setting.
The three figures under them are the whole year re-run, on every tap, so a choice states its own price before you commit to it.
After that, nothing is managed. There is no feeding, no inspecting, no intervening. Everything is fixed on the first of January and the colony is on its own, the way a colony is.
The compare room
The same year, run twice, with one thing changed and everything else held. The same hive in the gardens instead of the hedgerow. The same colony in a bigger box. Change two things and you cannot say which one did it, so the app will not let you.
Both hives are drawn, not just charted, and the room names the date the two years pull apart. That date is usually the answer.
The lessons
Each one opens with a number worth remembering and closes with where it came from.
Privacy by design
HiveLab has no analytics, no ads, and no sign-in. It does not use the network at all: the whole colony is solved on your device, in milliseconds, every time you change something. Read the full privacy policy.