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The Spirit of the Hive and How a Superorganism Evolves

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Honeybee Neurobiology and Behavior

Abstract

Social insects presented Darwin (1859) with major difficulties for his fledgling theory of evolution by natural selection. How could differential survival and reproduction result in sterility, differential anatomy and behavior between sterile workers and queens, and differentiation among the sterile individuals of a colony? Maurice Maeterlink, Belgian author and Nobel Laureate, wrote (in 1901) about the “inverted city” of the honey bee noting that there is no central authority, that order and organization is achieved mysteriously through what he called the “spirit of the hive” [Maeterlink M, The life of the bee. Dodd, Mead, and Company, New York, 1913]. William Morton Wheeler [J Morphol 22:307–325, 1911; The social insects. Harcourt, Brace and company, New York, 1928], Harvard entomologist and philosopher, proposed that insect societies are true “superorganisms” because they are organized for nutrition, reproduction and defense, a view that was initially supported by biologists but lost favor by the early 1970s. Hölldobler and Wilson resurrected the superorganism in their book The Superorganism: the Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies [W. W. Norton, New York, 2008]. However, fundamental questions remain about the evolution of insect societies as superorganisms. Not only is there order without central control (the spirit of the hive), there is also no central genome on which natural selection can operate to sculpt a social system. Here, I will locate and define the honey bee “spirit of the hive” and show how selection operating on social traits involved in colony nutrition, a superorganismal trait of Wheeler, changes the genome, development, physiology, and behavior of individual workers that affect the “spirit of the hive” and, therefore, social organization.

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Abbreviations

dsRNA:

double stranded RNA

QTL:

Quantitative trait loci

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Robert E. Page Jr.

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  1. Robert E. Page Jr.
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Correspondence to Robert E. Page Jr. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Neurobiology, Universität Konstanz, Universitätsstrasse 10, Konstanz, 78457, Germany

    C. Giovanni Galizia

  2. , Department of Neurobiology, Freie Universität Berlin, Königin-Luise-Str. 28-30, Berlin, 14195, Germany

    Dorothea Eisenhardt

  3. , Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition An, CNRS - Université Paul Sabatier, Route de Narbonne 118, Toulouse Cedex 9, 31062, France

    Martin Giurfa

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Page, R.E. (2012). The Spirit of the Hive and How a Superorganism Evolves. In: Galizia, C., Eisenhardt, D., Giurfa, M. (eds) Honeybee Neurobiology and Behavior. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2099-2_1

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