A bee is a flying insect that plays one of nature's most important jobs: pollination. When bees visit flowers to drink nectar (a sweet liquid flowers produce), pollen sticks to their fuzzy bodies and gets carried from flower to flower. This helps plants make seeds and fruit. Without bees, we'd lose many of the fruits and vegetables we eat every day.

The most famous bee is the honeybee, which lives in colonies of thousands and makes honey by collecting nectar and transforming it inside the hive. A honeybee colony has one queen who lays all the eggs, male drones, and thousands of female worker bees who do everything from gathering food to building the wax honeycomb.

Bees communicate through dances: a worker bee who finds good flowers returns to the hive and performs a waggle dance that tells other bees where to fly. This discovery won a scientist named Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize.

When threatened, bees can sting, injecting venom that causes pain and swelling. Honeybees die after stinging once because their stinger gets stuck, but other bees can sting multiple times.

People also use bee to describe busy group activities, like a spelling bee (a competition) or a quilting bee (neighbors gathering to sew together). These gatherings got their name because everyone works together busily, like bees in a hive.