Richard Dawkins first used the term "extended phenotype." Soon, people began to extend the meaning far beyond what he meant. He explains it like this:

> A desert is colonised by weeds, which then change conditions sufficiently to allow the subsequent invasion by an orderly succession of plants and animals, each wave altering niches in ways that favour the next wave, culminating in a climax forest.  The climax forest is a consequence of colonisation by weeds decades or even centuries earlier. The forest is not an extended phenotype of the weeds’ genes, nor is it helpful or illuminating to call it a niche constructed by the weeds.

Dawkins distinguishes between niche construction and niche changing. Honey bees change their niches, they do not construct them. They build nests either in cavities or right out in the open, depending on climate and the availability of cavities. They and wasps, build elaborate structures but the do not build the cavities themselves. If bees live in a small cave in a huge cliff, the cliff is not their extended phenotype.

Just like the term organism, a phenotype has to have boundaries. The insect colony is called a super organism but this is a metaphor. The organism is the bee, it's just that honey bees can't live solo. Most other bees can. 

If the extended phenotype is everything that is involved in the life of the organism, then we must extend it to its food supply, water, air, all of it. This is called the Gaia Hypothesis: that the earth is one big extended phenotype. Which completely neutralizes the meaning of phenotype. It can't be a "thing" and "everything" at the same time.

PLB

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