Ants are social insects
Well, what are the ants - everyone has seen them. This is a separate family of Hymenoptera insects; in addition to ants, other very famous, well-known inhabitants of the earth, like bees and wasps, also enter the Hymenoptera order. And ants differ from bees and wasps primarily in that they have wingless workers. All bees, all wasps, they are winged, so to speak, almost all. Winged ants are only females and males before mating. Ants have three castes.
All of the listed insects are social insects, but with a small caveat: bees and wasps are both solitary and social. And all ants are exclusively social. There is not a single species among ants that would lead a solitary lifestyle. And there are actually more than ten thousand species of ants around the world.
What is sociality for insects? This means that they live in a permanent community, a long-term community, which we call a family, because it is a family by origin. And this family consists of three castes - these are females that lay eggs, that is, this is a reproductive individual, these are males that appear in the family for a very short time and after fertilization of females in most species, males die. They die naturally, their lives are over. But there are some species that have a slightly different system, but there are no such species in Russia, so we will focus on our domestic ants. The majority of the population is made up of workers. In principle, these are physiologically underdeveloped females that perform all the functions of building a nest, foraging for food, for defense, for rearing the brood, for caring for the female and larvae. That is, the entire life of the family is provided by working individuals. And when we talk about family organization, about the evolution of the social way of life in ants, this is primarily the development of relationships in the system of workers, which, as the family grows, begin to perform various functions and get the opportunity, firstly, to realize specialization , and secondly, they are able to perform a number of tasks that are simply impossible in small families. This is, for example, maintaining an active temperature in the nest.
Ants, in principle, by origin, they are all tropical and subtropical insects. And while they lived and live there, all the problems associated with maintaining the temperature are solved there in a natural way. True, there is a situation when they have to arrange ventilation in order to avoid overheating. But in our conditions, in a temperate climate, the situation is different. In order for ants to develop normally larvae, and ants are insects with complete transformation. That is, they first develop a larva separately, then it pupates, most of the species braid the pupa with a cocoon, and then an adult insect emerges from the pupa, which does not grow further and does not change morphologically throughout its adult life.
How long does an ant live?
Ants live a very long time. If we talk about the life of a worker, then a worker ant in our ordinary ants can live up to seven years. And an egg-laying female up to 20 years old is an absolute record in the world of insects. They live so long because they have a well-established social system. That high life expectancy, about which we care so much, they organized a long time ago.
Ants (Fig. 1) live on all continents except Antarctica. They live in families. The ant family can number from several hundred to millions of individuals. It depends on the species. They also differ in size - from the smallest (about 2 mm) to giants (2-3 cm).
Ant families build their houses in the ground, in wood, under stones, some on trees (Fig. 2), and some roam, that is, they move.
Rice. 2. Anthill ()
An ordinary red ant is probably familiar to you. You have all met their nests - anthills, which can be up to 1 meter high. But this is only the visible part, the hidden part is in the ground and may be even larger than the outer one (Fig. 3).
Rice. 3. The device of the anthill
There are always a lot of passages and chambers in anthills. It's not just a house, it's a whole city. In such a nest there is one or more female queens, the main task which consists in laying eggs to replenish the population of the anthill. Young females are winged and shed their wings after mating. Many species of ants are known, but there is not a single one that would lead a solitary lifestyle.
Most of the population of the anthill are workers who do all the work. They build, repair the nest, ventilate it, wrap it around it, take care of the larvae and pupae, and store food.
Soldier ants protect the anthill from enemies. There can be several thousand of them in the nest.
In rainforests, where floods are frequent, ants live in trees. Tailor ants make the most amazing nests; they build hanging houses from leaves (Fig. 4).
Rice. 4. An anthill on a tree
Ants are very poor eyesight but they have a highly developed sense of smell and touch. These organs are found on the antennae of ants. With them, they feel all objects, distinguish between their own and others, and also find their way to their anthill.
Many animals store food for future use, and ants know how to do housework, they have pets and mushroom gardens. Ants are the only creatures other than humans that have pets.
The most valuable for ants are their "cows", aphids (Fig. 5).
Aphids suck plant sap and process it into a sweet syrup. This is the syrup that ants love. Having approached the aphid, the ant tickles its belly with its antennae, milks the aphid, and it immediately releases a drop of syrup, licking it off, the ant hurries home with the burden, where it is deposited in the pantry. Ants do not leave their "cows" unattended. They protect them from enemies, walk them when the sun is shining, build shelters for them and hide them.
More than a hundred known various kinds ants breeding mushrooms. These are leaf cutter ants. They cut pieces of leaves, take them to the nest, chew and grow special molds on this mass. Such ants are capable of harming plantings, as they gnaw on leaves, buds and flowers.
There are reaper ants that feed only on seeds. They know how to harvest plant seeds and grind them into flour.
Ants are very hardworking creatures. They bring great benefits to the forest. In 12 hours, ants can bring 33,000 harmful caterpillars into their home. Therefore, where there are anthills, the forest is healthy and clean.
There are ants in the world that do not know how to work, but can only fight. These are Amazon ants. They are quite large, their length is about 1 cm. They kidnap the pupae of ants of other species and then use them as labor force. Amazon soldiers are not even able to feed themselves, so in order to do the job they are forced to recruit labor force- slaves.
There are dangerous ants, nomad ants. They are called vagrants, army ants, because their colony can contain thousands of ants. They do not build nests, but constantly roam and arrange halts so that their queen will lay thousands of eggs. When the offspring emerge from the eggs, the army continues on its way, instilling fear in everyone. Ants carefully raise their larvae and continue their movement, attacking any creature that got in their way.
Fire ants are considered one of the most dangerous. They inflict very painful bites that feel like burns. The poison they inject causes strong allergic reactions that can lead to death.
Pharaoh ants live in human houses. They were first discovered in the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs, but gradually spread throughout the world. These uninvited guests cause a lot of trouble by eating people's food.
Ants are one of the longest living insects. Workers can live from 1 to 5 years, queens - from 15 to 20 years. Thus, an anthill, in which young queens replace old ones, can stand in one place for more than one hundred years.
Ants secrete a caustic liquid called formic acid. A person uses this acid to treat certain diseases. The inhabitants of Mexico know how to extract honey from ants, which are called honey ants. These insects drink the juice of sweet oak. They store juice in their abdomen. They feed them to the larvae. It tastes like bee honey.
Probably, in every home there is such an important product as honey. Honey is taken from bee hives (Fig. 7), where it is stored in wax cells, honeycombs. Honey is made by bees (fig. 6).
There are also many types of bees on earth. They live almost everywhere except Antarctica. Some bees live independently, others live together. By the specific smell, bees distinguish their own from strangers. Bees feed on nectar and pollen from plants.
Honey is given to us by bees. They are called honey bees. Each hive has its own queen bee. This is the largest bee, only she lays eggs. Other bees are workers. They take care of order, construction. The queen lives up to 5 years, and worker bees - only 5 weeks in summer and up to six months in winter. There are also drones, these are males that appear in the family just before swarming (Fig. 8). They differ from worker bees in their large eyes and thickness.
Swarming is the division of a bee colony for reproduction and education. new family.
The hive is filled with combs, which are divided into cells (Fig. 9). Some of them serve as a nursery, where the larvae grow, the other - pantries. Honey is the winter food of bees, because in winter they do not sleep, and plants do not bloom at this time of the year. For this, the bees work all summer, and these reserves are enough for both them and humans.
Among the bees there are scouts who are looking for new sources of food. If they are lucky, they use a special dance that tells them how far to fly for the nectar.
A working honey bee is easy to recognize - it is always on the move, flying from flower to flower, crawling along the flower, trying to gain more on the hairs covering its body. From them, she cleans pollen into baskets from her hind legs. A bee is able to carry a load exceeding its weight by more than 300 times.
So, bees and ants work diligently and harmoniously, and a person has a lot to learn from them.
Bibliography
- Samkova V.A., Romanova N.I. The world around 1. - M .: Russian word.
- Pleshakov A.A., Novitskaya M.Yu. The world around 1. - M .: Education.
- Gin A.A., Faer S.A., Andrzheevskaya I.Yu. The world around 1. - M .: VITA-PRESS.
- The festival pedagogical ideas "Public lesson" ().
- Detishka.ru ().
Homework
- Draw an ant and a bee. What features of their structure did you notice?
- Compare the lifestyle of an ant and a bee. How are they similar? What is the difference?
- *Ask your parents to show you an anthill in the forest and an apiary. What impressed you the most? Discuss this with your classmates.
Social and domesticated insects
Most insects lead a solitary lifestyle. However, there is alsosocial insects . These includetermites, bumblebees, wasps, bees, ants . The community of these insects is one big extended family. Social insects share food with each other, take care of the larvae together, and guard the nest.
Bees and ants are social insects
bees.The social insects arehoney bee . A large family of bees has up to 100 thousand individuals that live in a hive. Most of the insects in the hiveworkers bees. These are infertile females in which a modified ovipositor serves assting . They clean the hive, collect nectar, take care of the queen and larvae, protect the hive from enemies. They live one warm season (less than a year). In a bee family, the main bee isuterus , which lays eggs - up to 2000 per day. The queen is larger than the worker bees. She lives for about five years. In the spring, in May - June, a new queen and several dozen males appear from the pupae in the bee colony, which are calleddrones: they do not take any part in the work, and their main task is the fertilization of the uterus. In autumn, the worker bees drive the remaining drones out of the hive and they die.
All care about the hive lies with the worker bees: growing up, each worker bee changes several "professions". She builds combs, cleans cells, feeds larvae, takes food from incoming bees and distributes it in the hive, ventilates the hive, guards it, and finally begins to fly out of the hive for nectar. Bees communicate with each other in the same way as ants - with the help of touch and excreted substances.
However, only bees have a "language of dance". With the help of special body movements and movements, one bee can tell others where the nectar-rich flowering plants . The scout bee "dances" in the hive on the combs.
On the bottom side The abdomen of the worker bee contains special glands that secretewax . From it, bees, thanks to complex instincts, buildhoneycombs . On the hind legs bees have areas surrounded by long chitinous hairs - baskets. The bees crawl over the flowers, and the pollen falls on the hairs of the insect's body. Then the bee cleans the pollen into the basket with the help of special brushes on the paws of the legs. Soon a ball of pollen is formed there - a pollen, which the bee transfers to the hive.Perga - Pollen impregnated with honey - serves as a reserve of protein food for the bee colony.
Worker bees have a peculiar expansion of the esophagus -honey goiter . From the nectar collected from the flowers, which passed through the honey goiter, the main food supply of the bee family is formed -honey . Cells are filled with honey, which the bees cover with a thin wax layer. For a year, up to 100 kg of honey can be obtained from one bee family.
Although man has been breeding bees for a long time, collapsible frame hives were invented relatively recently - in 1814 by the Ukrainian beekeeper P. I. Prokopovich. Prior to this, in order to extract honey from a bee nest, which, as a rule, was located in a hollowed-out log of a tree, it was necessary to break the honeycomb, that is, to ruin the bee colony. The surviving swarm of bees can live independently, without human help. This indicates that bees are not yet fully domesticated.
Ants- social hymenoptera. They do not have a sting, but a poisonous gland has been preserved, thanks to which they can protect themselves from enemies. Red forest ants are of great benefit to the forest. Ants of one anthill eat tens of thousands of insects per day and protect the forest on an area of 0.2 hectares from pests. They live in families.
The anthill consists of aboveground and underground parts. Most of the ants living in the anthill are wingless working individuals - these are barren females. Their number sometimes reaches a million. In addition to them, a queen lives in an anthill. She doesn't have wings either. She breaks them off after the nuptial flight. All her life she lays eggs, and all the care of the anthill lies with the worker ants. They forage, repair and clean the anthill, feed the larvae and the queen, defend the anthill in case of attack by enemies. Once a year, at the beginning of summer, winged females and males appear from pupae in the anthill, which go on a mating flight. After mating, the males die, and the females shed their wings and found a new anthill. They can also get into the anthill in which their development took place.
Most ants are predators. Some feed on the sweet secretions of aphids. For this, ants guard, "graze"these insects that feed on plants, and sometimes build shelters for them. Other types of ants breed mushrooms in underground chambers for their food, bringing crushed plant leaves for this. There are herbivorous ants.
Ants communicate by touching each other with their antennae, legs, and head. In addition, they have a "chemical language" - they secrete special substances with which they mark their paths. By smell, ants recognize relatives and enemies.
FROM the false behavior of social insects is called instinctive because instinct - a set of innate moments of behavior, fixed hereditarily and characteristic certain kind animals. The behavior of bees, ants, and some other animals is so amazing and complex that it leads many people to believe that it is intelligent. However, these actions of animals are instinctive, unconscious.
domesticated insects
There is only one completelydomesticated insect , not found in nature in the wild, -silkworm ; females of this species even "forgot how" to fly. An adult insect is a thick butterfly with whitish wings with a span of up to 6 cm. The caterpillars of this silkworm eat only mulberry leaves, or mulberry tree.
Scientists suggest that in the wild, the ancestor of the silkworm lived in the foothills of the Himalayas. The butterfly was domesticated in China around 3,000 BC. e. Nowadays, this insect is completely domesticated. It is bred in China, Japan, the countries of Indochina, in Southern Europe, South America, Central Asia and the Caucasus - where the mulberry tree can grow. There are several dozen breeds of silkworms, differing in length, strength and color of the silk thread they produce.
Silkworm females lay eggs (each female - up to 600 eggs), which are calledgrenay . Caterpillars emerge from them. These caterpillars are fed with mulberry leaves in special rooms on the aft shelves. When pupating, each caterpillar viet for three days.
insects living big families are called social. Members of the family of social insects are divided into two groups: males and females, which perform the function of reproduction, and workers, who do not participate in reproduction, but jointly perform all the work to maintain the life of the family and protect the individuals of the first group. Only representatives of two series form families: Hymenoptera and Termites.
The Hymenoptera series combines insects with complete metamorphosis, which have two pairs of transparent wings, fused (Fig. 69). Another feature of Hymenoptera is that males are born only from unfertilized eggs. The Hymenoptera series includes about 90,000 species of insects.
Developed hymenoptera - stinging insects: wasps, bees, ants. All of them take care of their offspring.
Wasps are both social and solitary insects. They feed their larvae with animal food, which they obtain by paralyzing their victims with a sting. Adult wasps feed on plant nectar or aphids. They build nests from a kind of semi-finished paper: they bite off small fibers of wood with their jaws, moisten them with saliva and fray.
The life cycle of the forest wasp family, common in the forests of Ukraine, is as follows. In the spring, a female flies out of the storage - some kind of crack in the wood. AT convenient location she arranges a nest hanging from the ceiling of the vault and consists of several cells. In each cell, the female lays an egg, from which a larva emerges. The female feeds the larvae chewed by insects. She brings them food, like a bird, feeds the chicks. The larvae pupate, and after the pupal stage, they turn into workers. Now they themselves arrange nests and take care of new larvae. In addition, the workers feed the female, whose sole duty is to lay eggs. Workers are also females, but they do not participate in the breeding process. Outwardly, female workers do not differ from the female queen and after her death they are able to lay their own eggs. During the summer, the number of individuals in the nest grows, the family increases. At the end of summer, not workers appear from eggs, but full-fledged females and males mate. The males then die and the females hide until spring. With the onset of winter, a “real tragedy is played out” in the nest: the old female and workers kill all the larvae and pupae, do not have time to develop, and then they themselves die.
Hornets are large wasps that sting very painfully. They make their nest in the hollows of trees. How construction material for the nest, they use not wood, but the bark of branches of young birches. The larvae are fed on insects, including honey bees.
bees. The honey bee is one of the few insect species that humans have domesticated (Fig. 70). A bee family consists of a queen (queen), workers (underdeveloped females, which, unlike wasps, are not capable of reproduction) and male drones. After mating, the drones are not allowed into the hives, so they die or the worker bees kill them. Bee larvae develop in wax cells, from which the bees build special rows - honeycombs.
Did you know that in order to produce 1 kg of honey, a bee brings 150,000 servings of nectar from 100,000,000 flowers to the hive, while covering a distance of up to 300,000 km? This is enough to go around 5 times Earth along the equator.
Young worker bees perform a variety of work: they clean the cells of the combs, feed the larvae, the queen, build the combs, and then begin to collect pollen and nectar from the flowers.
Bees move to new places in families, called swarms, and consist of a queen and workers.
bees are very beneficial insects. Firstly, they give honey - a tasty and nutritious product. Secondly, wax is obtained from honeycombs, which is used for the manufacture of varnishes and paints, as well as in the electrical industry. Thirdly, these insects produce bee glue, or propolis, which has an antimicrobial effect, promotes wound healing. The composition of propolis includes resinous substances, wax, pollen, etc.. Bees use propolis to cover cracks in the walls of the hives, and humans use it in medicine. However, the most important thing is that bees pollinate plants.
Bumblebees are, in fact, big bees. They lead a social lifestyle. They make their nests in secluded places. In early spring single females fly low above the ground, looking for a place to found a new family - a gap or some kind of mink in the ground. The nest of a bumblebee is spherical and consists of several cells. One cell develops larvae, while the other contains honey reserves. The development of larvae lasts 20-30 days. Worker individuals emerge from the pupae, much smaller than the queen. After the death of the queen, the workers are able to multiply.
Bumblebees are one of the most vulnerable groups of insects. In many European countries, a large fine is levied for catching only one bumblebee. However, despite conservation measures, many species of these beneficial furry insects resembling teddy bears have almost disappeared. Of the 38 species of bumblebees living in our country, 10 species need special protection.
Did you know that in the world of insects there are cuckoo bumblebees that lay their eggs in the free cells of the nests of other species of bumblebees? Since all bumblebees are very similar, the owners of the nests treat the larvae that appeared from other people's eggs as if they were their own.
Termites belong to insects with incomplete metamorphosis. By way of life and features external structure they are like ants, they are often called “white ants”. Termites live in numerous families in the soil or wood and rarely appear on the surface. They build huge cone-shaped buildings, similar to anthills, where millions of individuals live. Termite colonies consist of winged males, a queen (queen), and workers. The largest worker individuals become soldiers, they have strong jaws, so their purpose is to guard the nest. The rest of the workers provide food for the soldiers and the queen, who are unable to feed themselves. Only males and queens can fly, but after the mating season, the males die, and the fertilized female loses her wings and begins to lay eggs. Only one species of termites live in the steppe zone of Ukraine - photophobia termites.
social insects form families consisting of males and females capable of breeding, and individual workers who serve them. Such a distribution of individuals by function is a special phenomenon in the animal world.
Check yourself. 1. Which insects are called solitary, and which ones are social? 2. What are distinctive features hymenoptera insects? 3. Describe life cycle families of wood wasps. 4. What is the difference between the life of a bee family and the life of a family of wasps? 5. How is an ant family formed?
