Guard honey bees patrol the entrance to the nest and are thought to recognise nestmates by cuticular hydrocarbons. We aimed to determine whether honey bee guards can recognise predatory common wasps Vespula vulgaris and nestmates by olfactory cues. Odours were transferred between both honey bees and wasps and the responses of guards to controlled introductions monitored. When controlling for th...

The life history of Chalcoela iphitalis-a common brood parasite of social wasps-has been described in previous literature, but critical information regarding oviposition behavior and possible differential host parasitism remain cryptic. Here we report on infestation levels of this moth in field populations of paper wasps in Polistes and Mischocyttarus, as well as the oviposition behavior of the...

This study reports a novel form of interference behaviour between the invasive wasp Vespula vulgaris and the New Zealand native ant Prolasius advenus. By videotaping interactions at bait stations, we found that wasps commonly remove ant competitors from food resources by picking up the workers in their mandibles, flying backward and dropping them unharmed some distance from the food. Both the f...

A colony of social insects is like a fortress where access is allowed only to colony members. The epicuticular mixture of hydrocarbons has been widely reported to be involved in nestmate recognition in insects. However, recent studies have shown that polar compounds (mainly peptides) are also present, mixed with hydrocarbons, on the cuticle of various insects, including the paper wasps of the g...

Aggressive competition is an important aspect of social interactions, but conflict can be costly. Some animals are thought to minimize the costs of conflict by using conventional signals of agonistic ability (i.e. badges of status) to assess rivals. Although putative badges have been found in a range of taxa, little research has tested whether individuals use badges to assess potential rivals b...

It takes a special kind of insect to pollinate an inside-out flower, which is exactly what the wasps that pollinate figs do. Crawling inside the firm swelling lined with microscopic flowers that will eventually ripen into a fleshy fig, tiny fig wasps pollinate the flowers within while laying their own eggs. However, the fig wasps’ robust nursery is not entirely secure. Renee Borges from the Ind...

We examined gustatory responses of the larval parasitoid Microplitis croceipes to determine whether the adults discriminate among common sugars, including fructose, glucose, maltose and sucrose, found in plants. When given single sugar solutions of sucrose, glucose, fructose and maltose at concentrations of 0.008-2.0 mol l(-1), the estimated concentrations at which 50% of wasps initiated feedin...

Given the diversity of animal signals, there has been recent interest in categorizing signals into probable functions according to their properties. For example, models predict that signals of quality should be costly and condition dependent, whereas signals of individual identity should be cheap and expressed independently of condition. Here, we test these predictions by comparing the conditio...

It takes a special kind of insect to pollinate an inside-out flower, which is exactly what the wasps that pollinate figs do. Crawling inside the firm swelling lined with microscopic flowers that will eventually ripen into a fleshy fig, tiny fig wasps pollinate the flowers within while laying their own eggs. However, the fig wasps’ robust nursery is not entirely secure. Renee Borges from the Ind...