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🍯 Royal Jelly: Production & Caste Determination Lab

A 3D cutaway of a worker cell and a queen cell being fed by nurse bees: control how many days a larva gets pure royal jelly and watch its growth curve and caste outcome respond live.

Biology & Life3DModerate60 FPS

Nurse bees secrete royal jelly from glands in their heads and pack it into brood cells — every larva gets it briefly, but only larvae kept on it continuously develop into queens. This lab lets you dial that diet duration and watch a larva's growth and fate respond.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

A worker-shaped hex cell and a peanut-shaped queen cell are fed side by side. The worker-cell larva's "royalactin exposure" climbs while it stays on pure royal jelly and decays once switched to worker jelly, driving its final size and caste outcome.

🎮 How to Use

Set how many days the worker-cell larva gets pure royal jelly, adjust the nurse bees' secretion rate and the simulation speed, then watch the exposure, body size and jelly-pool readouts update as the cell caps and resets.

💡 Did You Know?

The chemistry that makes this possible is mostly water — royal jelly is roughly two-thirds water by mass, with proteins, sugars, fatty acids and trace vitamins making up the rest, shown in the floating composition ring.

⚙ Under the hood

A 3D cutaway of a worker cell and a peanut-shaped queen cell being fed by a nurse bee, where controlling the diet's royal-jelly duration changes larval growth and drives the simulated caste outcome toward worker or queen.

royal-jellybee-productshive-biologynutritionapiculturequeen-bee

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