Sunday, November 12, 2006

Dictatorship in the Insect World

Today, I read about an interesting article on the newspaper. It's about the way of life for some insects like bees, ants and wasps. These kind of insects are well known that they have a queen whose job is to lay millions of eggs and plenty of hardworking workers that work their ass off everyday finding food or taking care of the youngs and etc. For your information, those workers consists of female insects only. So, where are the guys? Their only job is to mate with the queen. Talking about the workers, they are females but don't they lay eggs too? The answer for that is yes, they do lay eggs. Here comes the catch, the eggs laid by the workers are usually ate by the queen herself or the other workers. Situation varies from different types of insects. For example, honeybee workers seldom lay eggs as they knew that their eggs will be eaten by their "colleagues" and the surviving rate of their eggs is less than one over one thousand. For another type of bee [I forgot the name], the success rate of an egg hatched is quite high because the queen is responsible to dispose the workers' eggs. But how much can a queen eat? So, the workers tend to lay more eggs as their eggs will be more likely to be hatched.

Actually this is just a sumarize version of what I have read. I don't remember some of the details but I do remember that this is a current reseach carried out to prove that the old point of view about these insects are wrong. So, that's about it. Billy, out.

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