SUMMARYSocial insects are characterized by reproductive caste differentiation of colony members into one or a small number of fertile queens and a large number of sterile workers. The evolutionary origin and maintenance of such sterile workers remains an enduring puzzle in insect sociobiology. Here, we studied ovarian development in over 600 freshly eclosed, isolated, virgin female Ropalidia marginata wasps, maintained in the laboratory. The wasps differed greatly both in the time taken to develop their ovaries and in the magnitude of ovarian development despite having similar access to resources. All females started with no ovarian development at day zero, and the percentage of individuals with at least one oocyte at any stage of development increased gradually across age, reached 100% at 100days and decreased slightly thereafter. Approximately 40% of the females failed to develop ovaries within the average ecological lifespan of the species. Age, body size and adult feeding rate, when considered together, were the most important factors governing ovarian development. We suggest that such flexibility and variation in the potential and timing of reproductive development may physiologically predispose females to accept worker roles and thus provide a gateway to worker ontogeny and the evolution of sociality.

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Abstract. Ropalidia marginata is a primitively eusocial polistine wasp in which, although there is only one queen at any given time, frequent queen replacements lead to a system of serial polygyny. One of the most striking features of this system is the enormous variation in the success of different queens. Measuring queen success as queen tenure, total number of offspring produced, number of offspring produced per day of tenure, and proportion of eggs laid that develop into adults, we show here that each measure of queen success is correlated with worker-brood genetic relatedness and not correlated with worker:brood ratio or the age of the queen at takeover. We interpret these results as meaning that queens are better able to obtain the cooperation of workers when worker-brood genetic relatedness is high.