[en] Honeycomb structures with controllable size are of great interest for many potential applications such as containers for microencapsulating and controlled delivery, gas sensors, catalysis and photonic crystals and devices. A ZnO honeycomb structure was successfully fabricated on metal prepatterned Si substrates by the nanosphere lithography method combined with the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique. SEM images show that a Pt template gives rise to the regular ZnO honeycomb structure which has the same cell size as the diameter of polystyrene (PS) spheres; a Au template also leads to honeycomb structure but the average cell size is smaller than the diameter of PS spheres; while Ag fails to generate a ZnO honeycomb structure. The different ZnO patterns are related to the morphology and distribution of the metal nanoparticles when processed at 600 deg. C in a PLD vacuum chamber. The growth mechanism of a ZnO honeycomb structure is attributed to the catalysis of liquid-phase metal nanoparticles. X-ray diffraction measurements indicate that ZnO on all metal templates have the (0 0 2) preferential orientation. The photoluminescence properties of the ZnO patterns were also examined and compared. Such a method can be extended to produce honeycomb structures of other materials with controlled cell size and periodicity.