Reproductive workers insufficiently signal their reproductive ability in a paper wasp

Reproductive Economy in the Chalcidoid Wasp Melittobia.

The look of royalty: visual and odour signals of reproductive status in a paper wasp.

Reproductive conflicts within animal societies occur when all females can potentially reproduce. In social insects, these conflicts are regulated largely by behaviour and chemical signalling. There is evidence that presence of signals, which provide direct information about the quality of the reproductive females would increase the fitness of all parties. In this study, we present an associatio...

Workers of a polistes paper wasp detect the presence of their queen by chemical cues.

Differences in long-chain hydrocarbon mixtures among reproductive and nonreproductive individuals have been often revealed in social insects. However, very few papers demonstrated that these signatures actually act as contact pheromones used by nonreproductive to recognize the presence of a related queen in the colony. Cuticular and glandular hydrocarbons of Polistes paper wasps have been exten...

Reproductive Epidemiology of Aluminium Foundry Workers

160 non-smoking male workers engaged in the production of aluminium alloys were studied for their reproductive performance. The reproductive parameters studied included number of pregnancies, stillbirths, abortions in their wives and number of neonatal deaths, premature births, congenital abnormalities in their offspring. For comparison, 150 controls belonging to the same age group and socio-ec...

Alternative reproductive tactics in the paper wasp Polistes dominulus with specific focus on the sit-and-wait tactic

Polistes dominulus females that adopt nests are less cooperative and may expend less energy than nest founding wasps. In an enclosure, 14 nests were adopted by individuals previously unassociated with any nest. No preference for enclosure or non-enclosure nests was detected, suggesting that adopters do not preferentially secure nests containing non-descendent kin. Instead, adopters — who were s...