Western honey bee

This small, stripy insect talks in dances, builds in hexagons and helps grow much of our food. Workers are only just over one centimetre long, about as wide as your little fingernail. Like the monarch butterfly beside it on the tree, it is an insect that changes shape as it grows. It grows from egg to grub to pupa to adult.

A worker that finds good flowers performs a figure-eight waggle dance that tells others in the hive where to go, how far and how good the food is. Workers build honeycomb from six-sided cells that fit together with no gaps. The cells store eggs, pollen and honey, and hold the most weight with the least wax.

Each hive has one egg-laying queen, a few hundred males and many female workers that do all the hive chores. Those workers carry pollen in smooth baskets on their back legs, and hairs on their bodies trap more pollen as they visit flowers. Animal pollinators like bees affect about 35 per cent of the world's crop production, and about three-quarters of flowering plants need them to make fruit. Native to Europe, western Asia and Africa, these bees were taken by people to other continents from the 1600s and now live on almost every continent, including Australia.