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.
The life cycle of
social insects, with the exception of termites, consists of four stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult.
A method for testing kin discrimination within natural colonies of
social insects. Anim.
Microsatellite variation in a
social insect. Biochemical Genetics 31:87-96.
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).
Combining immune systems and
social insect metaphors: a paradigm for distributed intrusion detection and response systems.
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.
Most of the members of this genus are associated with
social insect nests, i.e., termites, bees and ants (Christiansen 1992).
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).