Laurence Van Der Post著 「The seed and the sower」Vintage classics刊 pp.25-26より抜粋およびその他

It was as if the individual at the start, at birth even, rejected the claims of his own individuality.
Henceforth he was inspired not by individual human precept and example so much as by his inborn sense of the behavior of the corpuscles in his own blood dying every split second in millions in defense of the corporate whole.
As a result they were socially not unlike a more complex extension of the great insect societies in life.
In fact in the days when he lived in Japan, much as he liked the people and country, his mind always returned involuntarily to this basic comparison: the just parallel was not an animal one, was not even the most tight and fanatical horde, but an insect one: collectively they were a sort of super-society of bees with Emperor as a male queen-bee at the centre.
He did not want to exaggerate these things but the knew of no other way of making me realize how strangely, almost cosmically, propelled like an eccentric and dying comet on an archaic, anti-clockwise and foredoomed course, Hara’s people had been. They were so committed, blindly and mindlessly entangled in their real and imagined past that their view of life was not synchronized to
our urgent time. 


岩波理化学辞典第5版　岩波書店刊　p1160より抜粋

フェロモン

微量で動物の特定行動を誘起する物質の総称。特に昆虫の生殖や行動に関わる昆虫フェロモンが重要である。その機能によって性フェロモン、警報フェロモン、道しるべフェロモン等に分類される。カイコガの雌が雄を誘引する性誘引物質ボンビコールをブーテナントらが発見したのが最初である。フェロモンは空気を媒介して感覚器官を刺激するものが多いが、経口的に効くものもある。女王蜂の頭腺から分泌される女王物質（Queen bee substance）のように雌蜂の生殖腺の発達を抑制して働き蜂にするような物質もフェロモンと呼ぶ。生体外に放出して動物の個体または社会行動や機能に影響を与える物質を一般にエクトホルモン（Ectohormone）というが、フェロモンもこの一種である。