Edward Osborne Wilson Boeken

A study of insect sociology, presenting individual investigations of wasps, ants, bees, and termites, and discussing caste, behavior, communication, symbioses, and other topics. "This first comprehensive study of social insects since the 1930s includes more than 250 illustrations and covers all aspects of classification, evolution, anatomy, physiology, and behavior of the higher social insects-the ants, social wasps and bees, and termites. Since the publication of W.M. Wheeler's "The Social Insects" in 1928 and Franz Maidl's "Die Lebensgewohnheiten und Instinkte der staatenbildenden Insekten" in 1934, the literature on social insects has increased enormously and entirely new ways of studying insect societies have developed. Mr. Wilson reinterprets here the knowledge on the subject through the concepts of modern biology-from biochemistry to evolutionary theory and population ecology. He reviews the evolution of parental care and other primitive forms of social behavior throughout the arthropods and investigates various forms of symbiosis between the social insects and other anthropods. He also compares insect and vertebrate societies in basic theoretical terms, showing how unified sociobiology is possible if developed as a branch of population biology" -- Book Jacket.

Hailed as "a masterpiece" by Scientific American and as "the greatest of all entomology books" by Science, Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson's monumental treatise The Ants also was praised in the popular press and won a Pulitzer Prize. This overwhelming success attests to a fact long known and deeply felt by the authors: the infinite fascination of their tiny subjects. This fascination finds its full expression in Journey to the Ants, an overview of myrmecology that is also an eloquent tale of the authors' pursuit of these astonishing insects