Tag: eusocial insects

Cuckoo Bumble Bees: What We Can Learn From Their Cheating Ways (If They Don’t Go Extinct First)

Learning how cuckoo bumble bees cheat the eusocial system can tell scientists a lot about how insect sociality evolves and how hosts and parasites coevolve. But, as other bees face declines, cuckoo bees will only get more difficult to study.

Entomology Today October 29, 2018 Leave a Comment

More Than a Pest: Termites as Models for Evolutionary Transitions

By Thomas Chouvenc, Ph.D. The Formosan subterranean termite (Coptotermes formosanus) is an infamous termite pest species, but it is also an interesting model for studying the evolution of termites and […]

Ant and Termite Fossils Indicate Advanced Sociality 100 Million Years Ago

Insects that are “eusocial” live in colonies with closely related nestmates and display social behavior, including a division of labor. The best-known examples are honey bees, termites, and ants. All […]

Different Insect Species Use Different Chemicals to Identify Queens

For years it was thought that ants, wasps, and other eusocial insects used a common class of chemical compounds to distinguish queens from workers and other members of their colonies […]

A Few Genes Allow Some Ants and Bees to Switch Castes

Two insect species from Latin America, the dinosaur ant and the red paper wasp, have been used to uncover the molecular mechanisms underpinning queen and worker roles in social insects. […]