A honeybee is a type of bee that lives in large, highly organized colonies and produces honey. These remarkable insects collect nectar from flowers and transform it into honey, which they store in hexagonal wax cells inside their hive. A single hive might house 50,000 bees working together with incredible coordination.

Honeybees have been humanity's partners for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians kept honeybees and used their honey as medicine and sweetener. Even today, beekeepers maintain hives and harvest honey, but they're careful to leave enough for the bees to eat through the winter.

Beyond making honey, honeybees perform a crucial job called pollination. As they move from flower to flower collecting nectar, pollen sticks to their fuzzy bodies and transfers between plants. This pollination helps flowers create seeds and fruit. Without honeybees and other pollinators, we'd lose many of the crops that feed us: apples, almonds, blueberries, and countless others depend on bee pollination.

A honeybee colony has three types of bees: one queen who lays all the eggs, male drones, and thousands of female workers who do everything else, from building the hive to defending it to gathering food. The workers even perform a wiggling dance to tell other bees where they found good flowers. This waggle dance communicates both direction and distance with astonishing precision.