Bees, Wasps And Ants (Hymenoptera)

This group gathers Insects subcategory members belonging to the order Hymenoptera, an order whose most advanced members show some of the most complex social organization found anywhere in the animal kingdom, built around a colony with one or more reproductive queens and large numbers of sterile worker offspring. It spans the honey bees and bumblebees, essential pollinators of crops and wild plants alike, the ants, whose colonies range from a few dozen individuals to supercolonies of millions, the social wasps such as the yellowjackets and paper wasps, and a large number of solitary hymenopterans including the ichneumon and braconid wasps, which parasitize other insects, and the sawflies, whose plant-feeding larvae superficially resemble caterpillars despite the group's very different ancestry.