
Study spells out why some insects kill their mothers - DrScump
http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/32823
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danharaj
It makes me think that our naming of the brood mother "Queen" and the drones
as "Workers" is actually a human biased understanding of the behavioral
structure of eusocial insects. It is easy for us to impose on other organisms
the notion of a hierarchy of subordination when we observe their
organizational behaviors, but how often does this unexamined bias hinder
understanding?

~~~
whyIndeed
Well, these are a different species of insect though. Yellow jackets are
wasps, fundamentally different from honey bees.

The behavior of honey bees is one driven moreso by an inherited willingness to
engage in servitude, than with wasps. Wasps are predatory carnivores, and
their nests are smaller, more distributed, and constructed out of found
materials, modified and pasted together. Wasps don't construct nests of
secreted wax, they use mud and chewed up wood. Most wasps don't make any
honey.

In honey bee hives, the manner of reproduction and sex selection is different.
The queen really is the window through which the genome passes, and her
capacity to produce devoted offspring, hopelessly obedient to her brand of
pheremones, is her mark of success as an organism. And if she produced peers
and not subjects she'd never have the spare time or the environment in which
to gestate her offspring.

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marincounty
Don't understand why wasps kill poor little honey bees. They don't even eat
the bees? I saw one wasp trying to kill a honey bee in my back yard. I got
some tweezers and saved the honey bee. It felt good, and I didn't get bit.

~~~
DrScump
it gets worse. Look up the recent PBS biopic of E.O. Wilson and his studies of
matabele ants, which predate on (and _exclusively_ eat) termites.

And worse yet, there are species of predatory _fungi_ that infect insects,
turning them into virtual slaves even while consuming their failing bodies.

Sleep well.

~~~
kentosi
Can you please share the name of this fungi?

~~~
bananaoomarang
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis)

