Why is that wasp helping?
By Susan Milius
For the first time, researchers have found nests of a social insect with helpers that are neither close kin nor slaves.
In the wasp species Polistes dominulus, about a third of females nest with an unrelated female. In the arrangement, one becomes the queen and the other submits to a nonreproductive working life, reports David C. Queller of Rice University in Houston. He and his Rice colleagues cooperated with a team from the University of Florence on the wasp-helper analysis, published in the June 15 Nature.