A frame of brood tells a story: the queen's egg-laying discipline, the colony's nursing capacity, and — sometimes — the fingerprints of disease. This lab builds a procedural honeycomb frame of hundreds of cells and colours each one by its real-world state (egg, larva, capped brood, honey, pollen, or empty), then layers on disease signatures so you can compare a tight, solid pattern against a spotty or diseased one side by side.
The field note and stats update live: a solid, even pattern with high viable-capped percentage reads as a strong, young queen. Rising empty "shotgun" cells with no disease signature usually means a failing or drone-laying queen; the same emptiness alongside a disease signature points instead to brood disease killing larvae before they're capped.
A healthy queen in her prime can lay over 1,500 eggs a day — more than her own body weight — and produce a brood pattern so consistent that experienced beekeepers can often judge her age and vigour from a single frame held up to the light.
A procedurally generated 3D frame of brood that lets you dial queen quality, a seasonal dearth dip, and specific disease signatures independently, so you can learn to tell a genuine problem from a normal lull.
Queen quality shapes how tight and even the capped-brood oval is; a seasonal dearth thins the pattern without disease markers; each disease overlays its own visual signature — chalky mummies, twisted larvae, sunken or perforated cappings — onto affected cells.
Move the queen-quality and dearth sliders to see a healthy pattern degrade into "shotgun brood," then pick a disease and raise its severity to compare disease-driven gaps against queen-driven ones. Toggle the heat-map to see the frame the way an inspector reads cell health at a glance.
Beekeepers call an irregular laying pattern with many skipped cells "shotgun brood" — but the same visual symptom can come from a failing queen, a genuine nectar dearth, or active brood disease, which is exactly why context and disease-specific cues matter.