VARIETIES OF WASP SOCIETY 



colony, while the collection of wood-fibre involves a great 

 deal of hard work. Yet in spite of these limitations, the 

 behaviour of wasps is sufficiently remarkable. Although 

 there is no advanced type of division of labour, one does 

 find that groups of workers are simultaneously engaged in a 

 number of complicated tasks. This is seen especially in nest- 

 construction, when foraging, envelope-building, and the 

 making of cells and suspensory pillars may all go on at once. 

 It is perhaps easier to understand how the single founder 

 queen may do these things in the appropriate order than 

 how a large number of workers can share out the work at 

 one moment. 



The behaviour involved in temperature regulation is 

 particularly noteworthy. When the nest gets too hot, it 

 appears to be only some of the workers which take the steps 

 necessary to cool it. In a more typical example of instinctive 

 behaviour, all individuals exposed to apparently identical 

 stimuli might be, expected to do the same thing. We do not 

 yet know whether the workers which go and fan the rest are 

 those which have themselves temporarily got hotter than the 

 others, or whether they take up the work for some other 

 reason. Fetching water to cool the nest, as in Polistes, 

 raises a further problem, since the wasps are not cooling 

 themselves but only the nest they sit on. 



The workers are, it is true, very little different from the 

 queens, except in a few species like the common wasp. Even 

 here the difference is much less than in the honey bee or ant. 

 It is clear that we do not yet fully understand what turns a 

 grub into either a queen or a worker. It certainly looks as 

 if it is mainly due to automatic factors, such as the growth 

 of the colony, or of external ones, such as temperature. It 

 is perhaps wise here to make a qualification. There is always 

 a possibility that when two possible types of development, 



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