any insect which lives in organized social groups; examples are ants, wasps, bees and termites, where different morphological forms carry out different duties within the colony
To be environmentally successful, social insects depend on division of labor, not only between queens and workers but also among the workers themselves.
Rodgers has assembled a diverse set of actors in Debugging the Link between Social Theory and Social Insects: ants, bees, biologists, sociologists, and entomologists.
Division of labor is key to the success of many social animals, most notably the social insects, as specialized individuals work more efficiently to accomplish tasks (HUGHES & BOOMSMA, 2007).
Because social insect colonies are intermediate in their degree of integration between a single soma and a collection of unconnected individuals, they have been favorite subjects for studies of self-organization (see, e.g., Camazine et al., 2001).
The existence of sterile individuals in social insect colonies poses an evolutionary paradox, namely the difficulty of perpetuating sterility by natural selection when bearers of this trait leave no offspring.
The vast majority of acarine species in most social insect nests are scavengers or predators on other arthropods and do not adversely affect the ecology of the host (Eickwort, 1990).