92 
Psyche 
[March 
of the “queenless” species occur only one to a colony, or are they 
present in some numbers? If the latter, are they commonly actual 
siblings, or how closely are they, on average, related? Is there a 
tendency, in the “queenless” species, to confine worker production to 
a single individual even if a number of potential worker-producers 
are present? If such laying workers are in fact fertilized, are their 
mates normally derived from the same or from other colonies? Are 
such workers singly or multiply inseminated? Is a single individual 
inseminated more than once during its lifetime? What is the average 
contribution of male progeny by the non-fertilized members of the 
colony, and how is the production of males regulated ? How resistant 
is the genus to extreme inbreeding? Is it the rule that a proportion of 
each successive brood of workers brought to maturity in a colony is 
fertilized and that these individuals remain with the parent colony, so 
prolonging the life of the community well beyond the normal two 
generations, or do newly fecundated workers typically leave the 
parental nest? How indeed are new colonies normally formed? 
Such questions as these must be answered before any critical 
assessment of the direction of social evolution in Rhytidoponera can 
be undertaken. The results reported in the present paper, derived in 
the course of some ten years of investigation of the genus both in the 
field and in the artificial nest, represent the early stages of an obser- 
vational attempt to provide answers to a very few of them. 
SOURCE OF WORKER AND MALE BROOD IN A SPECIES OF 
RHYTIDOPONERA POSSESSING NORMAL QUEENS 
Rhytodoponera purpurea 
Rhytidoponera purpurea is a typical member of the R. impressa 
group, in which normal queens are characteristic. A single such queen 
is typically found in each colony taken in the field. According to 
Brown (1954) the species occurs in New Guinea and ranges in 
Australia through the rain forests of the Cairns-Atherton Tableland 
region of northern Queensland. 
On December 27, 1963, a typical, populous colony of R. purpurea , 
comprising the parent female, some 250 workers, and numerous larval 
and pupal brood including sexual males and females, was collected 
near Kuranda in northern Queensland. The following day a similar 
colony was taken at Millaa Millaa on the Atherton Tableland. In 
early January these colonies were housed in a type of modified earth- 
containing glass Lubbock nest used throughout these investigations. 
The colony from Kuranda was divided at the time of nesting into 
several isolated groups of workers with broods of cocoons and larvae. 
Only one such group had access to the brood female. The colony 
