Sentences with phrase «social insect species»

Not exact matches

Despite the common perception that bees are social insects living in large colonies, most bee species are solitary.

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.

Caravan suggests that diseases may have helped to drive the evolution of soldier castes, at least in some species of social insects.

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).

«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.»

Most of my career I have worked on social insects, studying conflict and cooperation in bumblebees, different species of ants, and honeybees.