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CHROMOSOMES AND SOCIALITY. "Social insects tend to have higher chromosome numbers than their non-social counterparts ... worker specialisation in ants roughly correlates positively with chromosome number." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

SOCIALITY GENES? "The genomes of many social insects exhibit unique properties that appear to be associated with sociality. For example the haplodiploid genetic system, found in all Hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants), can provide the basis for eusocial evolution by providing relatedness incentives for sib-rearing." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

PHEROMONES AND ANTS. "One of the early studies of swarm intelligence investigated the foraging behavior of ants. It had long been known that the ant “highways” often seen in nature (and in people’s kitchens) are laid down by individual ants depositing pheromone, a chemical attractant, which increases the probability that other ants will follow the same path to the food source." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

BEE PHEROMONES. "The needs of a honey bee colony are communicated between bees by pheromones, chemical signals which trigger behavioral responses. Honey bees have a variant of the same foraging gene that controls the onset of foraging behavior. Elevated expression of this gene correlates with increased foraging activity." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_of_social_behavior View in LinkedIn

EPIGENETIC FACTORS. "Queens and workers are different phenotypes arising from the same genome ... whether an individual becomes a queen or worker depends on how it responds to environmental stimuli at critical periods in caste determination, rather than genotypic differences. Phenotypic variation exhibited by castes therefore usually arises through differential expression of shared genes." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

DIVISION OF LABOR. "A honeybee colony, individuals specialize in certain tasks, depending on their age. Older bees, for example, tend to be the foragers for the hive. But the allocation of tasks is not rigid: when food is scarce, younger nurse bees will forage, too ... scientists have yet to understand exactly how honeybees regulate their division of labor." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

TASK ALLOCATION. "One of the major drivers in the evolution of social complexity is task partitioning between group members. In social insects it is taken to extremes in the form of reproductive (queen) and non-reproductive (worker, soldier) castes." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

BROOD SORTING BY ANTS. "The workers of the ant ... sort the colony’s brood systematically. Eggs and microlarvae are placed at the center of an area, the largest larvae at the periphery, and pupae and prepupae in between. One explanation of this behavior is that ants pick up and drop items according to the number of similar surrounding objects." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

QUORUM SENSING IN INSECT COLONIES. "Social insect colonies are an excellent example of a decentralized system, because no individual is in charge of directing or making decisions for the colony. Several groups of social insects have been shown to use quorum sensing in a process that resembles collective decision-making." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing View in LinkedIn

CORPSE SORTING BY ANTS. "Workers pile up their colony's dead to clean their nests. If the corpses are randomly distributed at the beginning of the experiment, the workers will form clusters within a few hours ... individual ants pick up and drop corpses as a function of the density of corpses they detect in their neighborhood." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn