Regulation of worker activity in the social wasp <Emphasis Type="Italic">Polistes versicolor</Emphasis>

In simple societies, activity of the workers can be regulated in a centralized way by a sole individual. Polistes wasps are simple in some respects because they have small, open colonies, with a single queen who is not morphologically differentiated from the workers. Worker activity in Polistes is episodic. Pause periods are followed by periods of intense activity, when most individuals are in motion. One way to investigate the regulation of worker activity is to see if activity periods are initiated by one specific individual. The queen was found regulating the resumption of activity in P. fuscatus in a centralized way, but recently, a decentralized regulation was found in P. instabilis and P. dominula. Thus, what is the pattern of regulation of worker activity in Polistes? To solve this question, broader studies of other species are desirable. Therefore, we investigated whether activity of P. versicolor workers are regulated by one individual. We tested for two mechanisms: triggering periods of colonial activity or actually physically stimulating workers to forage. The results demonstrated that no single individual was responsible to start periods of activity or physically stimulate worker’s departure. P. versicolor appears to be an example of a society with an intermediary organization of work, where the queen controls reproduction but does not organize work.