A SECOND COOPERATIVE STUDY OF VESPA VULGARIS. 
COMPARISON OF QUEENS OF A SINGLE NEST AND 
QUEENS OF A GENERAL POPULATION. 
By E. Y. THOMSON, JULIA BELL, M.A., and KARL PEARSON, F.R.S. 
(1) Scope and Material. 
In a first biometric study of Vespa vulgaris made two years ago* its authors 
compared the size, variability and correlation of wing parts of queens, drones and 
workers from a single nest, which contained 129 queens, 150 drones and several 
hundred workers. lu the present study the same measurements have been 
repeated on 188 queens, presumably belonging to many nests and collected in 
a different district. The nest of the first paper was taken in the autumn of 1905 
in the neighbourhood of Godalming. The queens for this second investigation 
were obtained in the spring of 1908 in the neighbourhood of Gerard's Cross. As 
soon as the first queen wasp appeared, a reward of Id. was offered for each queen 
wasp brought, and considerably over 200 were thus rapidly collected. Of this 
number certain individuals had to be rejected because their wings were damaged ; 
a few others were rejected because their colour raised suspicion that they had 
been thrown in from an old nest. The specimens came in small numbers, some- 
times one at a time, often alive, and there is no reason to doubt that they represent 
a genuine sample of the queen wasps of the autumn of 1907, which survived the 
winter and were starting in the spring of 1908 to establish their nests. 
Now this difference of season is a very important factor to be kept constantly 
in view. For perfect comparison of the mean characters of a nest and of the 
general population, we ought to have collected our queens from a couple of 
hundred Surrey nests, one or two from each, in the autumn of the same year as 
the single nest was taken. But the difficulty of procuring the number of nests 
required stood largely in the way, and we determined, at any rate in a second 
study, to investigate the general population queen in tlie spring, when collecting 
* A Cooperative Study of Queens, Drones and Workers in Vespa vulgaris. By Alexandra Wright, 
Alice Lee and Karl Pearson, Biometrika, Vol. v. p. 407. 
