Movie 1

Metamorphosis of the bees in the central slice view and by volume-rendered images. Movies of the (left column) first and the (right column) second worker honey bee shown by: (upper row) the central slice in the sagittal orientation and by (bottom row) volume rendered images. (upper row) The central slice movies provide a clear insight into the structural changes during different stages of metamorphosis. A sudden transformation from larva to pupa was followed by the evident structural changes in the gastrointestinal tract, in the tracheal system and also in many other organs. Spatial resolution of the movies is 78 μm. Bright regions correspond to fat-rich tissues, while the darker regions contain more body fluids; signal void regions contain no tissues. Blurred frames at the end of the movies indicate intense spinning by the pupa. (bottom row) A complete set of all image slices, i.e., a full 3D image also enables the volume rendering of the entire bee. This study was done with the Fiji distribution of the ImageJ digital image processing software on each of the acquired images with the matrix size of 256 × 128 × 128. The movies show worker bee metamorphosis from the sealed larva to the emergence of an adult bee.