Ingenious new support for that view:

The mighty insect colonies of ants, termites and bees have been described as superorganisms. Through the concerted action of many bodies working towards a common goal, they can achieve great feats of architecture, agriculture and warfare that individual insects cannot.

That’s more than just an evocative metaphor. Chen Hou from Arizona State University has found that the same mathematical principles govern the lives of insect colonies and individual animals. You could predict how quickly an individual insect grows or burn food, how much effort it puts into reproduction and how long it lives by plugging its body weight into a simple formula.  That same formula works for insect colonies too, if you treat their members as a collective whole.

And this is not just an accounting trick.  If you take a “colony” of, say, 100 people and and measure how much energy their bodies use it would be 100 times the energy that a single body uses (duh.)  But a single animal that weighs 100 times as much as a human uses only 100^(3/4) ≈ 32 times as much energy as a single human.  There are economies of scale within a single organism but not across.

Except with ant colonies.  The mass to energy ratio of the colony as a whole follows the same law that governs indivduals of non-colony animals.  Via Not Exactly Rocket Science.