Why some insects kill their mother? New study unlocks the puzzle for you!

For most social insects such as ants, wasps and bees, the workers which female, devote whole life to help the queen produce new offspring. But there were reports about workers kill their queen came out. Thus, why some insects kill their mothers has been a great puzzle for entomologists for a long time. Why do these workers help the queen in some situation but also kill them in other situation? That's paradoxical and confusing. In order to solve the puzzle, entomologist Kevin J. Loope, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside, set up observation colonies of yellow jacket wasps in his lab, used video camera to film them continuously and noted when matricide happened. Loope also collected wild colonies to increase the sample size and infer matricide from mature, queenless colonies. The worker wasps kill queens when they are in colonies with lots of full siblings, but not in colonies with a mix of full and half siblings. After research, the researchers found that workers can assess the relative proportions of full and half-siblings of their colony and respond adaptively when conflicts of interest turn up, such as rearing the sons of workers or the sons of the queen. This research shows the first thorough investigation of the behavior of queen-killing, which is an event, common but hard to observe. Loope now aims at finding out how yellow jacket wasps' interaction with other species. The report is published in Current Biology online. Go there to find more about the puzzle. Extended reading>>>http://www.cusabio.com/Clone/CT0239-1089564.html