Overview
SimBee drops you into the world of Apis mellifera from both the colony-management and the individual-bee perspective. From the god-view you steer the whole hive -; brood, foraging, defense, seasons. Then you can swoop down and follow a single bee through the swarm, or step inside the hive to watch comb get built, brood get raised, and the queen do her work. The pitch is that a colony is a genuine superorganism: no bee is in charge, yet tens of thousands of them coordinate through the waggle dance, pheromone signals, and collective decision-making.
It doubles as an educational tool -; there's a user manual that's also a field guide to bee biology, plus a teacher guide -; so the science (castes, the dance language, hive architecture, seasonal cycles, diseases and parasites) is meant to be real, not just flavor.
How It Works
SimBee began as a Godot/C# project and is now a browser/WebGL build. It's one HTML shell
plus a handful of plain-JavaScript modules that each hang themselves off a global
SB namespace -; no framework, no bundler, no build step. Open
SimBee.html and it runs.
- Rendering is three.js (r128), loaded from a CDN by a failover loader that tries three mirrors before giving up -; the only external dependency.
- Modules split cleanly: a world (sky, terrain, hive, flowers, weather, seasons), the outdoor swarm and its flight-AI state machine, a separate hive-interior scene, a camera rig with orbit / first-person / follow modes, and a click-a-bee inspector.
- State autosaves to
localStorage, so reloading resumes your colony.
Current Status
Playable on the web and documented, but still a work in progress -; the game design and bee science carried over intact from the Godot version; the web port is where the controls, UI, and a few systems are still settling.
- Live web build plus a reconciled user manual and teacher guide.
- Colony management, foraging, the waggle-dance communication system, seasons, threats, and a research/upgrade track are all in.
- Marked WIP -; the port is the moving target, not the underlying simulation.