London Zoo: Cooperative care of young insects

I love being a mom, but I will never deny how hard it can be to take care of children. Help from family and friends is essential. In my ideal world, a lot of adults would work together to raise the young.

That dream is a reality for social insects. They likely have more help raising their young than any other animal moms. In some species, there is a single mom (the queen) and tens of thousands of helpers — adults who care for the young despite not having offspring themselves. In other species, there is more than one queen in a colony, typically from two up to dozens. In these colonies, all the queens lay eggs and become mothers while dozens, hundreds, or thousands of helpers take care of the developing young.