A tiny one-person utility craft with mechanical arms, used around Starfleet drydocks and starships for maintenance and cargo handling, first seen at work on the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
The worker bee is a small utility pod used by Starfleet for work in space. It has a cabin for a single operator in a spacesuit, a pair of manipulator arms and fittings for towing strings of cargo containers.
The craft was created for Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Several are seen buzzing about the orbital drydock as Kirk and Scott make their slow approach to the refitted Enterprise, and others move freight in the ship's cargo bay. Their yellow colour and busy movement gave them their name.
The design returned decades later in Star Trek: Discovery, set a few years before the original series, where updated worker bees are kept in the shuttlebay of the USS Discovery and are seen around Starfleet's ships and stations. Their presence in both eras suggests that the basic pattern served Starfleet for a very long time.