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🐝 Bees, Ants, and Their Colonies

Go inside the buzzing hive and the underground ant city to see how social insects work as one team.

lessons

~20 min

to learn

🔬 Science

subject

Ages 6–12

level

Start the course →

What you’ll learn

Life Inside a BeehiveUnderstand that bees are social insects and learn the roles of queen, workers, and drones.Honeybees are social insects that live together in a hive. Each hive has one queen who lays all the eggs, many female workers who build comb, feed the young, and gather food, and some male drones. Every bee has a role, and their teamwork keeps the colony alive.
How Bees Work TogetherLearn how bees communicate with the waggle dance, make honey, and pollinate plants.Bees work together in clever ways. A worker does a waggle dance to point others toward flowers. Foragers gather nectar and, through several steps, turn it into honey to store for winter. As they visit flowers, bees also spread pollen, helping plants make seeds and fruit.
Amazing Ant ColoniesExplore ant colonies, meet leaf-farming ants, and compare bees with ants.Ants are social insects too, living in underground colonies of up to millions with a queen and workers. Leafcutter ants even farm a fungus for food. Like bees, ants have one egg-laying queen and many workers, but they build different homes, showing how teamwork helps tiny insects do huge jobs.

Questions this course answers

What do we call insects that live and work together in large groups?

Insects like bees and ants that live in big cooperating groups are called social insects.

What is the queen bee's main job?

The queen's job is to lay eggs, sometimes over a thousand in a single day.

Which bees do most of the work in the hive?

Worker bees, which are all female, clean, build, feed the young, and gather food.

How does a bee tell others where good flowers are?

A bee does a waggle dance, moving in a pattern that points to the food and shows how far it is.

Why do bees make honey?

Bees turn nectar into honey and store it as food to survive the cold winter.

How do leafcutter ants use the leaves they carry?

Leafcutter ants use the leaf pieces to grow a fungus, and the fungus is what they eat.

Grounded in trusted sources

National Geographic Kids
Smithsonian Institution
Britannica Kids

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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