Fig. 1

A flow chart of initialising a honeybee simulation in SIMplyBee. The first step is simulating a desired number of founder genomes and specifying the global simulation parameters in a new SimParamBee object. Next, we create the base virgin queens from the founder genomes. We can simulate any number (nInd) of virgin queens with the maximum being the number of simulated founder genomes. We choose one virgin queen as the future queen of the colony (left). On the other side (right), we select n virgin queens to provide drones for the DCA. We could select more virgin queens as future queens to create more colonies, and more virgin queen to contribute to the DCA. We next cross the virgin queen to a sample of drones from the DCA and use it to create a colony. We next build-up a colony, which adds in a desired number of workers and drones. The build-up also results in a productive colony