Gadagkar, R (2019) What Can We Learn from Insect Societies? [Book Chapter]
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PDF (Gadagkar, R. 2019. What Can We Learn from Insect Societies? In: Social Science at the Crossroads, Randeria, S. and Wittrock, B. (Eds.) Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands pp.17-26)
Gadagkar 2019-In Social Science at the Crossroads.pdf - Published Version Download (7MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Introduction: Many species of insects such as ants, bees, wasps and termites live in societies pamlleling, if not bettering, our own societies, in social integmtion, communication, division of labour and efficient exploitation of environmental resources. What indeed can we learn from insect societies? The short answer, which I will state up-front, is that we can learn a great deal, but there is also a great deal that we cannot/should not learn. Let me begin with an anecdote. Because I work on insect societies and people easily relate to this topic, I often get invited to lecture to high school students. On one such occasion, when I was describing the life of the honeybee, I explained how a colony of bees gives rise to a new colony. A colony of honey bees consists of many thousands of workers, a small number of drones and only one queen. While the drones do nothing except mate, and die in the process, all the tasks involved in nest building, cleaning, maintenance and guarding, food gathering and processing, as well as nursing thousands of larvae, are performed by the workers. Under normal situations, the queen is the sole reproducer of the colony, laying thousands of eggs per day- fertilizing them with sperm she has gathered from numerous drones from foreign colonies and stored in her body, to make new daughters and withholding the flow of sperm into the oviduct and laying unfertilised eggs that develop parthenogenetically into sons. To make a new colony, the bees will have to first rear a new queen, and this they do by building special large-sized cells and feeding the larvae in them with a special royal jelly, which directs their development into fertile queens mther than sterile workers. When a riew queen completes development, there is a potential problem- the colony now has two queens, the mother and the daughter. But since each colony can only pave a single queen, one of them has to leave. It is an invariant "tmdition" in honey bees that it is the mother who leaves with a fraction of the workers, to undertake the risky mission of building a new home in a new .location and start brood production all over again. The daughter inherits the ready-made old nest with most of the workers and indeed, with all the honey, brood and wax that comes with it.
| Item Type: | Book Chapter |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Brill |
| Additional Information: | copyright to this article belongs to Koninklijke Brill NV |
| Keywords: | Insect societies, Honeybees, Division of labour |
| Department/Centre: | Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 02 Feb 2021 10:57 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Feb 2021 10:57 |
| URI: | http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/67564 |
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