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Figure 2
A natural swarm of honey bees. (UC Davis)
have a better understanding of the ways in which colonies self-organize into social
units with a division of labor. But, we still know little about how selection on social
traits of colonies eff ects heritable changes that are re� ected through diff erent levels
of organization such as development, physiology, and behavior of workers, thereby,
resulting in changes in superorganism phenotypes – the Darwinian explanation.
How does a superorganism evolve a complex social organization? � ere is no centralized
control of behavior, no social genome on which natural selection can act, and
a hierarchy of organizational levels from genes to the society. In the following sections
I am going to provide a brief overview of the biology and natural history of honey
bees, de� ne the mechanisms behind the mystical “spirit of the hive” of Maeterlinck,
and then discuss a 20 year selection program designed to map the eff ects of colony
level selection on a single social trait, a characteristic of the superorganism, across
diff erent levels of biological organization.
Robert E. Page, Jr.: The ‘Spirit of the Hive’
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