Social Insects Quotes

Ants are a curious race

The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.

Together, the ants eat the elephant.

When you hear buzz around the beehive, you know they're making honey in there.

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.

The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ants; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.

The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.

Ants are good citizens, they place group interests first.

For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

So, the ant way of life is very ancient and very successful. As far as human beings are concerned, we've been around for only one million years--too soon be sure.

But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.

If army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule:Just do what the ant in front of you does. The ants eventually end up in a circle. There's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days; the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died.

For so work the honey bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

The bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive.

Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.