Gadagkar, R (2011) What Can We Learn from Insect Societies? [Book Chapter]
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Gadagkar 2011-In Narasimha.pdf - Published Version Download (5MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Many species of insects such as ants, bees, wasps and termites live in societies paralleling, if not bettering, our own societies, in social integration, communication, division of labour and efficient and sustainable 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 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 honey bee, 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 oflarvae, 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 rather than sterile workers. When a new 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 have a single queen, one of them has to leave. It is an invariant "tradition" 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 |
|---|---|
| Series.: | Part 1 - Nature and Culture |
| Publisher: | Centre for Studies in Civilizations and PHISPC (Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture) |
| Additional Information: | copyright to this article belongs to Centre for Studies in Civilizations and PHISPC (Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture) |
| Keywords: | Insect societies, Ant agriculture, Human agriculture, Swarm intelligence, Ant colony optimization, Argentine ant, Iridomyrmex humilis |
| Department/Centre: | Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Mar 2021 06:56 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Mar 2021 06:56 |
| URI: | http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/68316 |
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