1.To understand how The elaborate social systems of honeybees or ants may have arisen, let us consider first some members of the order Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants) in which sociality is less highly developed
2. A female bee of the sub social genus Halictus constructs an underground comb of up to 20 cells, lays an egg in each, provisions the cells with food, and then closes the nest, after which she may remain on guard until her offspring emerge.
3. In some species the young bees leave and build their own nests elsewhere, but in some they remain in the parental nest, enlarging it and laying. their. Though there are no castes, and each female is capable of reproduction, there is a breakdown of spatial barriers; and the communal sharing of a nesting site can easily be imagined as the evolutionary forerunner of more complex social systems in other bees.
4. At a more advanced stage of sociality are the bumblebees. Here again the nest is founded in spring by a single female. But unlike the offspring of the Halictus bee, the young that hatch from the founding bumblebee's eggs do not become reproductive in their own right; they serve as workers enlarging the nest, gathering nectar and pollen, and caring for the young that hatch from later eggs laid by the founder. The founder, who remains in the nest as the queen, now devotes almost all her energy to egg laying. Eventually there may by several hundred, or even a thousand, bees in the colony.
5. As the season nears its end, some unfertilized eggs are laid that give rise to males, and some of the fertilized eggs give rise to queens when the young that hatch from them are treated in a special fashion.
6. These new reproductive individuals fly out and mate. The bees in the old hive die with the advent of winter, but the fertilized young queens hibernate and found their own nests the next spring. Because bumblebees have division of labor correlated with sterile castes, they are said to be eusocial (i.e. truly social), but their colonies, which must be founded anew each year because they cannot survive the winters are by no means as complex as those of honeybees.