Once a worker bee seals a wax cap over a fully-grown larva, the developing bee vanishes from view for days. Inside, the larva stops feeding, voids its gut, spins a thin cocoon, and begins histolysis — most larval tissues are broken down into a soup of cells that are then rebuilt, organ by organ, into the compound eyes, legs, wings and segmented adult body of a bee. This is complete metamorphosis (holometabolism): larva, pupa, and adult look almost nothing alike.
A capped drone cell has a distinctive domed, bullet-shaped cap raised above the comb surface — beekeepers can identify drone brood at a glance from this shape alone, long before any bee inside is visible.
A cutaway 3D wax cell reveals what a beekeeper never sees directly: the sealed larva unfurling into a pupa whose eyes darken, legs and wings sprout, and cuticle hardens and tans, day by day, until the sealed cap is chewed open from inside.
Queens, workers and drones follow the same morphological script — prepupa, eye pigmentation, limb and wing growth, cuticle sclerotisation, eclosion — but on caste-specific timetables, and nurse-bee thermoregulation shifts the pace of that visible progression.
Pick a caste, then scrub the day slider (or let it auto-play) to watch the pupa's eye colour, limbs, wings and cuticle change in real time. Push the brood-nest temperature away from the bees' ~35°C target to see development lag or race ahead.
A capped drone cell bulges outward into a distinctive domed "bullet" cap — visible proof of the bigger cell a drone pupa needs, and a shape experienced beekeepers can spot from across the hive.