Secrets of animal life / by J. Arthur Thomson.

  • John Arthur Thomson
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Secrets of animal life / by J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    are going better, yet not too well, the young females remaining at home have to work so hard and on such scanty food that their reproductivity is hindered. Although fertilised they are slow to lay. They continue helping their mother—and they thus almost originate a caste of “ workers ” ! Such polygynous or many-queened communities are restricted to warm countries where nesting continues all the year round. In cold countries the com- munities are always monogynous, i.e. there is but one functional queen. The workers remain more or less completely sterile. The queens of next year are the young females hatched near the end of the season, which, as we have already mentioned, spend the winter in safe retreats. It is interesting to think that the establishment of the monogynous society was probably Northern and relatively recent, being imposed upon wasps by climatic conditions. It is interesting also, though very grim, to recognise that the general massacre of the wasp-larvaB in autumn, when further nurture is hopeless, is not incongruent with the “ oecotrophobiosis.” For the young creatures that can no longer furnish elixir are not to be wasted. They are eaten up, and it is on the strength of them that the wintering young queens are able to sleep for many days without food, and to begin the cycle again next spring. It is altogether a very economical kind of domestic economy.