Reproductive Competition

Academic requirements for an insect society to be considered a superorganism vary broadly with authors and among sociobiologists. The two conditions that emerge as the most important are the lack of reproductive competition among nestmates and the state of social evolution where workers within colonies are at or beyond the “point of no return”—workers have lost the ability to live and reproduce independently. The search for reproductive competition within highly social colonies of ants and bees is a large academic research enterprise filling the contents of countless journals and books. However, a look at honey bees shows that these special conditions not only aren’t met but obfuscate the wonderful array of social states in which colonies exist within one population.