8 
A Third Cooperative Study of " Vespa Vulgaris " 
done a few years ago, since the interval has taught man himself on how minute 
details his own safety in flying depends. 
It is needless to say that these matters want testing and will be tested on far 
larger numbers, but the last columns of Table II seem to justify a very strong 
conviction that the survival of the queen wasp from autumn to spring depends very 
largely on the deviations in the size and proportioning of her wings not differing 
either in excess or defect very markedly from the type. 
If we turn to the relationship of the autumn queens to queens from a single 
nest, we find that in general they entirely confirm the conclusions we had drawn 
from the spring queens ; the variabilities are more than doubled when we pass 
from the nest queens to the general autumn population. The difficulty already 
referred to in our second paper is therefore emphasised when we compare nest and 
population queens of the same period ; instead of the 20 °/ 0 reduction we might 
anticipate we have over a 50°/ o reduction*. The possibility that this large 
reduction in variability was due to a winter selection which increased the varia- 
bility (see p. 58 of our second study) is thus definitely negatived by our present 
work. This result further demonstrates that the selective influence of environ- 
ment, as measured by the autumn to spring deathrate of queens (i.e. 10 °/ 0 to 20 °/ ) 
is only ^th to f ths as effective as the reduction, probably due to heredity, which 
marks the queens of the individual nest. 
(5) On the Relative Variability of the A utumn and Spring Queen Populations. 
Table III gives the coefficients of variation of all the characters dealt with. 
We see at once that the results drawn from the absolute variations are fully 
confirmed when we deal with these ratios of variability to size of character varying. 
We find that the autumn queens are 10 °/ o to 20 °/ 0 more variable than the spring 
queens; in fact but for the length of the cell h, the anomalous nature of which has 
already been pointed outf, we should have the autumn queens sensibly more 
variable for all characters. The coefficients of variation of the absolute sizes of 
the autumn queens are on the average about 3'50 — still very sensibly below most 
values hitherto obtained for coefficients of variation, and tending to confirm the 
view that the wing is an exceedingly delicate organ, in which closeness to type 
is of supreme importance. 
(6) Coefficients of Correlation of Autumn Queens compared with Spring and 
Nest Queen Populations. 
Table IV contains the comparative data. Again certain very definite con- 
clusions can be drawn. 
To begin with the correlations of the indices of the autumn queens are seen to 
be low and varying in sign ; in these characteristics they resemble more closely 
the nest queens than the spring queens. The conclusion therefore of our first 
study that the correlation between the proportions of different parts of the wings 
* See pp. 53 — 8 of our second study. 
f It is conceivable that the conditions of hibernation may vary the distribution of pigmentation at 
the end of the cell b, and that less concentration of pigmentation may render the position selected for 
the tangent (see Fig. II, p. 3) more variable. 
