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The organizations of insect societies, such as division of labor, taskallocation, collective regulation, mass action responses, have been consideredas main reasons for the ecological success. In this article, we propose andstudy a general modeling framework that includes the following three features:(a) the average internal response threshold for each task (the internalfactor); (b) social network communications that could lead to task switching(the environmental factor); and (c) dynamical changes of task demands (theexternal factor). Since workers in many social insect species exhibit \emph{agepolyethism}, we also extend our model to incorporate \emph{age polyethism} inwhich worker task preferences change with age. We apply our general modelingframework to the cases of two task groups: the inside colony task versus theoutside colony task. Our analytical study of the models provides importantinsights and predictions on the effects of colony size, social communication,and age related task preferences on task allocation and division of labor inthe adaptive dynamical environment. Our study implies that the smaller sizecolony invests its resource for the colony growth and allocates more workers inthe risky tasks such as foraging while the larger colony shifts more workers toperform the safer tasks inside the colony. Social interactions among differenttask groups play an important role in shaping task allocation depending on therelative cost and demands of the tasks.

Dynamical models of task organization in social insect colonies