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the other insects that have been examined. Given the crowded conditions of your average hive, one might imagine that pathogens would spread faster than colds at a preschool, which should select for highly vigilant immunity. One possible explanation is that the intense social behaviors of the bees, for example, the grooming and licking that individuals are always bestowing on each other, obviate the need for other defense mechanisms. It is also possible that honeybees, domesticated as they have been for thousands of years, will turn out to be an anomaly in this regard, a question that the sequencing of other social insect genomes should help settle. Two other startling results were the small total number of genes in the honeybee genome, and the apparent conservatism in the rate of the genome's evolution, compared with the mosquito Anopheles and Drosophila melanogaster, so that at least for some groups of genes, bees are more like vertebrates than those other insects. Contrary to what had been believed previously, in fact, bees seem to have arisen quite early in evolutionary history, branching off before the beetles.

Bees do have a lot of genes associated with producing and detecting pheromones, chemicals used to communicate with other individuals, which is not so surprising given their reliance on signaling within the colony, and they have some new genes that are associated with collecting nectar and pollen. But do they have special "sociality genes"? Several years before the honeybee genome sequence was completed, Gene Robinson noted that the difference between highly social insects such as the bees and solitary species such as Drosophila was likely to lie not in the creation of entirely new genes, but in changes in the way the same genes were turned on and off, or in the amount of product a given gene made. With some exceptions, this has turned out to be the case. Indeed, Robinson and his postdoc Amy Toth suggest that just as developmental biologists have discovered "modules" in body plans, with wings, legs, and arms produced from similar groups of genes in different animals, behavior can likewise be broken down into building blocks.

One of the most significant elements of insect sociality is the division of labor that Wilson cited above. Unlike other insects, or even virtually any other animal except for a few oddballs such as naked mole rats, in ants, bees, and termites queens do queenly things like produce eggs, males mate, and workers, well, work. Within the workers, different individuals often specialize on particular tasks, for example, going out and collecting food, or cleaning up the hive. This division, like the stratification of human industrialized societies, allows the colonies to be much more efficient. And the whole idea of sterile individuals that nonetheless labor for the group as a whole is a hallmark of sophisticated social organization. But what determines the destiny of any one individual?

It's arguable whether being a queen in a social insect colony is enviable or not, what with the continual egg laying and never getting outside, but the dogma used to be that queen honeybees were made, not born, via the feeding of royal jelly, a substance produced from glands in the heads of the workers that is given in lesser and greater amounts to different larval females. Adult bees, regardless of their social status, do not eat royal jelly. If you got a lot of royal jelly, the thinking went, you became a queen, while more modest amounts destined you for a short, chaste life among the colony proletariat. In the words of royalbeejelly.net, "Royal Jelly, the queen's food, makes the queen into a bigger animal with superhero powers," which I suppose is true if being capable of laying massive numbers of eggs is viewed as the insect equivalent of making yourself invisible. The association between upward mobility and royal jelly has given rise to a number of claims about the substance's ability to cure everything from asthma to wrinkles, though in a more sober moment surely someone has pointed out that bees suffer from