Archive | 2019
Cooperation in Social Insects
Abstract
Many species of insects, such as ants, bees, wasps and termites, organize themselves into societies that parallel, and sometimes better, human societies. They have impressive levels of social organization, communication, division of labor, cooperation and conflict, altruism and self-sacrifice, policing and punishment, and learning and teaching. They can accomplish feats in warfare with neighboring colonies or feats of internal cooperation such as the construction of sophisticated nests or mounds, which are impossible for individual colony members. They are organized into colonies whose sizes range from a few individuals up to a million or more, occupying from a few centimeters to hundreds of square kilometers (Fig. 1). Consider a honey bee colony – perhaps the best known insect society (Winston 1987; Seeley 2010; Page 2013). Their colonies comprise tens of thousands of individual bees, among which there is a single, large, and fertile female bee who is called the queen. Only the queen is mated, and with a store of sperm gathered from many males during her nuptial flight at the beginning of her life, she can lay thousands of eggs per day, both fertilized eggs that develop into females and unfertilized eggs that develop into males. Colonies may comprise a few male bees, also known as drones. The proverbially lazy drones do not take part in social life and do not contribute to domestic work. Instead, they leave their nests of birth and attempt to mate with virgin queens of other colonies. Drones successful in mating die in the act of copulation as their genitals are severed from their bodies and left hanging onto the females. The rest of the colony comprises smaller nearly sterile female bees, called workers. Workers have lost their genitalia over evolutionary time and cannot mate and cannot produce