Group-living insects such as ants, bees and wasps have some of the most fascinating social systems o

Group-living insects such as ants, bees and wasps have some of the most fascinating social systems on the planet. In each colony, the vast majority of individuals forego the opportunity to produce their own offspring, instead dedicating their lives to raising the brood of a single fertile queen (their mother). Although this division of labour may seem unfair, the female workers benefit due to what is known as a haplodiploid genetic system. This leads them to be more closely related to their sisters than they would be to their own offspring, and means they are likely to pass on more of their genes by helping to raise their sisters than they would by raising their own young. However, things are not always quite so straightforward. Although workers never mate and therefore cannot produce daughters, which require genes from two parents, they are able to produce sons by laying unfertilised or ‘haploid’ eggs, which inherit only 50% of their genes. The queen generally stops this from happening by eating any eggs that are not her own. But new research by Kevin Loope of the University of California into the behaviour of yellow jacket wasps shows that if a queen doesn’t mate with very many males when creating her colony, most of her worker daughters will be extremely closely related - and this can spell disaster. The haplodiploid system means that workers would share more genes with their sons and the sons of their sisters than they do with their brothers. As a result, if most of the workers share the same father, they may be driven to kill their queen and take over reproduction of male offspring. In this way, the workers can invest their energy in raising a future generation that shares more of their genes. Despite outward appearances, the humble workers in eusocial insect colonies are evidently not mindless slaves to the whims of their queen, but can be motivated to rebel when their legacies are at stake.Ref: Loope K. J. et al., 2015. Queen killing is linked to high worker-worker relatedness in a social wasp. Current Biology [link] -- source link

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