CHAPTER IX 



SOCIAL LIFE 



The social life of insects may be fairly regarded as the 

 central subject in our presentation of the biological study 

 of these fascinating creatures, since the habits of such 

 societies as those of the bees and ants are commonly known 

 in their main features, and have attracted during many 

 centuries the admiring notice of mankind. A community 

 of bees, ants, wasps, or termites is a family, of which the 

 individual members are greatly multiplied and their associa- 

 tion for common activity so highly organised that the 

 individuality of the single insect becomes merged in the 

 wider individuality of the complex, social organism. Such 

 insect societies as these are by far the best known, but there 

 are others in which the community consists not of one 

 huge family, all the offspring of a single abnormally fertile 

 mother, but of an assemblage of families living together in 

 such a way as to promote mutual protection and provision. 

 W. M. Wheeler, whose comprehensive treatise (1923) on 

 the social insects has been already referred to, enumerates 

 as many as twenty-four different groups of insects among 

 which a common way of life has become more or less com- 

 pletely adopted. It is, however, doubtful if all of these 

 can be regarded as having developed so far beyond the 

 simple family relation as to attain a truly social state. 

 Wheeler himself designates fourteen of his twenty-four 

 groups as '' incipiently social or subsocial." It hardly 

 needs to be stated that very many insects, locusts, dragonflies, 

 butterflies, midges, for example, which are occasionally or 

 habitually gathered into flocks, cannot be reckoned even 



