I also want to understand how variability in these parameters can affect the group
success in social insects, in particular in honey bees.
The best way to think of what has been called
altruism in social insects is to return to an individual level of selection: that is, queen to queen.
«Our thinking is that queen
pheromones in social insects likely evolved from «fertility cues» used by female individuals of solitary insect species.
Researchers have long known that
in social insect societies, queens wield tremendous power, laying eggs to the exclusion of the other females in the colony.
Sean O'Donnell of the University of Washington, Seattle, who works on brain
development in social insects, including sweat bees, says this is the first time that it has been shown that participation in a social group is associated with augmented brain development.
A recent article by Penick, et al., found that ants in this genus produce some of the strongest antimicrobials
measured in social insects.
This is the biggest dataset so far for the study of gene
expression in social insects and it provides insight into the evolution of gene expression across ant species.
The research is elegant in its simplicity, according to entomologist Martha Weiss of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. «It quite clearly shows... individual
learning in social insects,» she says.
Defensive behaviours are well
known in social insects, which share a high degree of genetic relatedness and act altruistically for the good of the hive or colony.
The study looked at the factors that modify sperm behavior when there is competition with sperm from other
males in a social insect which only mates on a single day during its lifetime.
«Termites appeared some 150 million years ago while the social Hymenoptera appeared about 100 million years ago, so this discovery of a hydrocarbon as a royal - recognition pheromone in termites appears to predate its
use in social insects,» Schal said.
Rather, they studied the sex - specific factors that modify sperm competition and sperm
storage in a social insect whose females may live for decades but complete their life - time mating activity on a single day early in adult life when they disperse to found new colonies.
Scientists used to think the
molecules in social insects» regurgitated food were simply «byproducts,» says Ofer Feinerman, a biophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who was not involved in the study.
Role of genetic and social factors in modulating the efficiency of division of labour in social insects
Estimating effective paternity
number in social insects and the effective number of alleles in a population Nielsen, R., D. R. Tarpy, and H. K. Reeve.
According to our model, the worker caste is seen as a «neuter» caste whose sexual development is suppressed due to counterbalanced maternal and paternal imprinting and opens new avenues for understanding the evolution of caste
systems in social insects.
In some social insects, the males have just one chance to impregnate their queen — which they also use to spoil their rivals» chances by killing off their sperm.
In social insects, such behavior is more likely to occur in individuals whose potential for other tasks is diminished.