So something I'd like to talk about, and let me know if it's been covered and I missed it, is the differences between different colony-forming insects. Bees, hornets, ants, termites. Each has a queen and workers, but what are the differences in the way their colonies work?
Each, certainly, has builder capabilites since they all live in large hives/mounds/tunnels. I would argue, though, that it is the termites that are the most notably skilled of the group, as far as scale goes. Ants I would pin as the farmers of the bunch. Bees have their honey and fire, hornets their paper and lightning.
Bees and hornets are the most closely related of the four, and termites are the odd-man out as non-hymenoptera.
The relationship between bee and hornet hive-minds, with bees giving hornets headaches just by their presence, is something I'm quite fond of. Hornets lost their ability to emit and interpret the signals, but still receive them. Bee hiveminds, I feel, should be mostly individual-to-individual, a sort of telepathy more than anything else.
By contrast, ant hiveminds are more networked, able to carry less complex ideas but with a larger maximum distance. So, while a bee might be able to tell a long story in an instant to another bee right in front of her, an ant knows that there is work to be done on the other end of the colony, just not very specifically what.
Termites, the phylogenetic odd ones out, should probably have something fairly different. A hive mind which isn't psychic, but social. Rigorously enforced society which melds religion, government bureaucracy, culture, family, duty, and philosophy all wrapped up into one concept of "colony". They move as one not because they can read each other's thoughts psychically, but because they haven't really got a concept of individuality.
And then there's the cordycepts, which make sense as borg-like because (ignoring that they're very host specific in the real world) they can integrate all sorts of different species.
