INSECT SOCIOLOGY 

 BY VERNON KELLOGG, PH.D. 



Secretary of National Research Council, Washington, D. C. 



WHAT may be called our personal relations to 

 each other, resulting in various degrees and 

 types of social organization, constitute a sub- 

 ject of particular interest to the students of man and 

 his life. If insects could see each other as we see our- 

 selves maybe they can the students among them 

 would also have a lively interest in their own personal 

 relationships. These insect relationships may even 

 have some special interest to us, because they attain 

 a peculiarly high degree of specialization, perhaps be- 

 cause there are so many more kinds of insects than 

 there are of any other kind of animals indeed, than 

 there are of all other kinds of animals put together. 



Because of these many insect kinds there is an espe- 

 cially keen competition and struggle for existence among 

 them, and all kinds of adaptations and shifts for a living 

 are carried to extremes. Social organization is but an 

 adaptation for successful living. So the study of insect 

 sociology is but a study of a biological phenomenon. 

 Thar is also true, fundamentally, of human sociology. 



I here are individualists among insect kinds, insects 

 that set up no special relations with other kinds except 

 those of general competition for food and a place in the 



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