Simulating the built environment for another globally distributed species

Simulating the built environment for a globally

distributed and diverse species e.g. to cope with climate

change, has particular challenges. These are explored

here using honey bees (Apis Mellifera L), a vital

pollinator of food crops worldwide, consisting of 24

subspecies that maintain close temperature and humidity

control in a self-constructed or partly human constructed

built environment. Honey bee thermofluid characteristics

and their requirements of the structure are largely

unknown.

To address this an open source i.e. FreeCAD (Riegel and

Mayer, 2019) and OpenFOAM (Jasak, Jemcov and

Tukovic, 2007), computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

conjugate heat model was developed.

Results from the model demonstrate the power of CFD

in investigating the interactions with their built

environment of another species by showing significant

variation in convection flow with different honey bee

sub-species in differing distributions within the nest.