Hi all,

Found this in a recent edition of New Scientist and thought it would 
be of interest, given the recent discussion.

Regards,
Diotima



Egg police crack down on broody bees

    * 01 November 2006
Would better policing reduce crime? It does in some insect societies. 
The apparently harmonious behaviour of worker honeybees and common 
wasps is all down to a watchful police force.

Tom Wenseleers of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in the 
Netherlands and Francis Ratnieks of the University of Sheffield, UK, 
studied nine species of social wasps and the honeybee. In all of 
these colonies the workers have functional ovaries and could lay 
eggs, but instead they usually raise the offspring of the queen. What 
stops them from being selfish and laying their own eggs?

The answer turned out to be the "egg police". Wenseleers and Ratnieks 
found that the more effective the policing - where the queen or 
worker "police" eat worker-laid eggs - the lower the likelihood of a 
renegade worker laying its own egg (Nature, vol 444, p 50). "In 
honeybees the policing was so good, with 98 to 100 per cent of 
worker-laid eggs killed, that less than one in a thousand workers 
tried to lay an egg," says Ratnieks.

Conversely in some wasp species - particularly those with closely 
related workers - policing was slack and nearly half the workers laid 
eggs. When workers were not closely related they policed each other 
more strictly.
 From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 01 November 2006, page 16


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