ABSTRACT
Sociality has been an enormously successful strategy for insects. Indeed, the modern insect fauna is predominantly social with the social bees, wasps, ants and termites constituting over 75% of the total insect biomass. In an Amazonian rain forest, about a third of the entire animal biomass is composed of ants and termites, with each hectare of soil containing in excess of 8 million ants and 1 million termites. Social insects are also thought to dominate in most other habitats around the world (Hölldobler & Wilson, 1990; Wilson, 1985). It has been suggested that one of the primary reasons for the immense success of social insects is that social evolution has enabled the closely related individuals that typically comprise a colony to effectively divide up the tasks necessary for survival and reproduction and to produce specialists that effectively increase the colony’s overall efficiency in comparison to solitary insects (Jeanne, 1986a, b; Oster & Wilson, 1978; Wilson, 1985).
