La abeja volvió a la flor y la hormiga siguió su camino por el banco.

Abeja is a feminine noun, so it normally takes la.

A useful detail: some feminine nouns that begin with a stressed a- sound use el in the singular for pronunciation reasons, such as el agua or el águila. But abeja does not start with a stressed a, so there is no change: la abeja.

Spanish normally repeats the article before each noun in a list or pair joined by y.

So la abeja y la hormiga is the natural way to say the bee and the ant.

Also, la shows that these are specific creatures, not just any bee or any ant. If the sentence were introducing them for the first time as indefinite, you might see una abeja and una hormiga instead.

Volvió is the third-person singular preterite of volver.

That means it corresponds to:

• he/she/it returned
• or you returned in the formal usted form

In this sentence, the subject is la abeja, so volvió means that the bee returned.

Because the sentence is telling a sequence of completed actions in a story.

• volvió = the bee returned, a completed event
• siguió = the ant continued, another completed event

If you used volvía and seguía, it would sound more like background description or an ongoing scene:

• The bee was returning...
• The ant was continuing...

So the preterite fits a simple narrative much better here.

Not in this sentence.

Spanish has two different patterns:

• volver a + infinitive = to do something again
  Example: Volvió a mirar = He looked again

• volver a + place/noun = to return to
  Example: Volvió a la flor = She/it returned to the flower

Here, a la flor is a destination, not an infinitive, so the meaning is returned to the flower.

Because a is the normal preposition used with movement toward a destination.

So:

• volver a la flor = to return to the flower

Also, notice that:

• a + el = al
• but a + la does not contract

So a la flor stays a la flor, not al flor.

Siguió is the third-person singular preterite of seguir.

There are two things to notice:

• seguir is irregular in the preterite, and in the third person the stem vowel changes from e to i
• the u is added to keep the hard g sound before i

So:

• infinitive: seguir
• preterite: siguió

If it were written sigió, the pronunciation would be wrong in Spanish.

Su can mean several things in Spanish, depending on context:

• his
• her
• its
• your formal
• their

Here, it refers to la hormiga, so it means its or her, depending on how the English translation is being handled.

This is very common in Spanish: the possessive is less specific than in English, and context tells you who it belongs to.

Because su does not change according to the gender of the possessor.

It does not matter that hormiga is feminine. The possessive stays su.

Also, camino is a masculine noun, and its own gender is independent of the ant:

• el camino
• su camino

So the phrase means her/its path, but the noun camino itself is still masculine.

Because por often expresses movement through, along, by, or around a place or area.

In this sentence, the ant is continuing its path and moving in relation to the bank/bench, so por describes the route or area of movement.

By contrast, para usually points more clearly to a destination, goal, or purpose:

• Va para el banco = heading toward the bank/bench
• Va por el banco = going along/by/through the bank/bench area

So por is the natural choice here.

Banco is a word with several meanings in Spanish. Common ones include:

• bank as a financial institution
• bench
• in some contexts, other meanings such as a sandbank or a school of fish

So by itself, banco is ambiguous. The exact meaning depends on context. In this sentence, you should use the meaning already given in your lesson, because without context a native speaker could read it in more than one way.

The written accents show where the stress goes.

• volvió
• siguió

In both forms, the stress falls on the final syllable. The accent mark helps show the correct pronunciation and follows normal Spanish spelling rules for these verb forms.

For learners, it is useful to remember them as fixed forms:

• volvió
• siguió