bees.

Bees are among the most essential animals on earth. Approximately one third of all human food — including most fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds — depends on pollination, and bees are the single most important pollinator group in the world.

There are over 20,000 known species of bees, ranging from the solitary mason bee to the highly organized honeybee colony of up to 80,000 individuals operating as a single superorganism. Honeybees communicate the precise location of food sources through the waggle dance — a figure-eight movement that encodes distance, direction, and quality in a language that has been decoded by researchers and studied as one of the most sophisticated non-human communication systems known.