Sentences with phrase «social insects such»

Vargo said the work represents an important breakthrough, especially when one considers social insects such as honeybees, fire ants and termites are remarkable creatures among which thousands of individuals work together to form a superorganism.

Behavioural scientists usually assume that observation and imitation are at the heart of social learning, but social insects such as bees can also transmit information through touch, vibration and smell.

Certain species of beetles evolved to live with and leech off social insects such as ants and termites as long ago as the mid-Cretaceous, two new beetle fossils suggest.

Not exact matches

In colonies of social insects, workers perform a variety of tasks such as foraging, brood care and nest construction.

Much like social insects, such as honey bees and wasps and social animals like birds and mammals who use alarm calls, when under predation, they are capable of generating a coordinated attack».

They stress that inclusive fitness ideas have helped yield insights into many biological phenomena, such as why social insects have skewed sex ratios.

To establish that it happens in nature, too, Vargo and his colleagues collected 30 colonies of the destructive Reticulitermes speratus, a Japanese species related to most common termites in the U.S. Like bees and ants, termites are social insects that have different castes for different jobs (such as workers and royalty).

It's the first time that such sophisticated alarm signaling has been found in a social insect.

In social insects, such behavior is more likely to occur in individuals whose potential for other tasks is diminished.

They therefore exhibit a level of social organisation that is intermediate between solitary insects, such as houseflies, and the highly social honeybees, which have colonies of many thousands of individuals with queens that live for several years.

«The catalogue of genes involved in immune defence responses is well conserved among different bee species regardless of their level of social organisation,» explained Dr. Robert Waterhouse from the University of Geneva and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, «but it is much smaller than in solitary insects such as flies and mosquitoes that often live in more pathogen - rich environments.»

Add to this insect identifications, hanging human sized butterfly chrysalises, lectures on bio-design, termite technology, music, films such as The Hellstrom Chronicle, a bee social and an insect museum and you begin to get the picture of this wild and wacky weekend.