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🐝 Inside the Capped Cell: Honey Bee Pupal Metamorphosis

A cutaway 3D brood cell where you scrub through the capped pupal stage day by day, switching between queen, worker and drone timelines and hive temperature to watch eyes, legs, wings and cuticle colour emerge.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DModerate60 FPS

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.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

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.

🎮 How to Use

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.

💡 Did You Know?

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.

⚙ Under the hood

A cutaway 3D honeycomb cell lets you scrub day-by-day through a bee's capped pupal stage, switching between queen, worker and drone schedules and hive temperature to watch eye colour, legs, wings and cuticle darkening emerge in real time.

bee-developmentmetamorphosispupal-stagecaste-developmentinsect-biologyholometabolous-insects

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install