Introduction
Social living provides a multitude of advantages to its practitioners, including predation risk reduction, environmental buffering, food procurement, and possible mating advantages. The most advanced form of sociality is eusociality, characterized by overlapping generations, cooperative care of the young, and reproductive division of labor, which includes sterility or near-sterility of the overwhelming majority of colony members. With few exceptions, all the practitioners of eusociality are insects of the orders Hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps), Isoptera (termites), Thysanoptera (thrips), and Hemiptera (aphids). Social insects have been extraordinarily successful ecologically and evolutionarily. This success has at its most pronounced produced colonies 1) having a persistence many times the lifespan of most individuals of the colony, and 2) numbering thousands or even millions of individuals. Social insects can exhibit division of labor with respect to non-reproductive tasks, in addition to the aforementioned reproductive one. In some cases this takes the form of markedly different, alternative morphological development (polymorphism), as in the case of soldier castes in ants, termites, thrips, and aphids, while in other cases it is age-based (temporal polyethism), as with honey bee foragers, who are the oldest members of the colony (with the exception of the queen). Evolutionary biologists are still debating the fitness-advantage gained by social insects due to their advanced division of labor and task allocation, but hypotheses include: increased resilience against a fluctuating environment, reduced energy costs of continuously switching tasks, increased longevity of the colony as a whole, or reduced rate of pathogen transmission. Division of labor, large colony sizes, temporally-changing colony needs, and the value of adaptability and efficiency under Darwinian competition, all form a theoretical basis favoring the existence of evolved communication in social insects. Beyond the rationale, there is well-documented empirical evidence of communication related to tasks; examples include the waggle dance of honey bee foragers, trail marking by ant foragers, and the propagation via pheromones of an alarm state in Africanized honey bees.
Read more about this topic: Task Allocation And Partitioning Of Social Insects
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—S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Arthur Sheekman, Will Johnstone, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Monkey Business, a wisecrack made to his fellow stowaway Chico Marx (1931)
“We used chamber-pots a good deal.... My mother ... loved to repeat: “When did the queen reign over China?” This whimsical and harmless scatological pun was my first introduction to the wonderful world of verbal transformations, and also a first perception that a joke need not be funny to give pleasure.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“The role of the stepmother is the most difficult of all, because you can’t ever just be. You’re constantly being tested—by the children, the neighbors, your husband, the relatives, old friends who knew the children’s parents in their first marriage, and by yourself.”
—Anonymous Stepparent. Making It as a Stepparent, by Claire Berman, introduction (1980, repr. 1986)