Robert L. Jeanne, Departments of Entomology and Zoology, University of Wisconsin, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA

The social behavior of wasps in the family Vespidae has been the primary object of research for my students and me for a number of years. We have worked out many of the details of communication of alarm, recruitment of nestmates to food and new nest sites, pheromones and allomones and their glandular sources, as well as division of labor, individual specialization, foraging behavior, reproductive behavior, and nesting behavior. My central interest in recent years, however, has been the relationship between the size of a group and the properties of emergent group behavior. Using the organization of nest construction in the tropical swarm-founding epiponine Polybia occidentalis as a paradigm, we are investigating the effects of group size, worker age/fat content, and parasitism on individual work rate, mortality rate, per capita productivity, tempo, and, ultimately, colony life history strategy. We are also analyzing the mechanisms by which task groups interact to regulate nest construction and respond to perturbations in nest construction activity.

Selected recent publications:

• Jeanne, R.L., & Nordheim, E. V. 1996. Productivity in a social wasp: per capita output increases with swarm size. Behavioral Ecology 7: 43-48
• Jeanne, R.L. 1996. Regulation of nest construction behaviour in Polybia occidentalis. Animal Behaviour 52:473-488
• Jeanne, R.L. 1999. Group size, productivity, and information flow in social wasps. In: C Detrain, JM Pasteels, & JL Deneubourg, (eds): Information Processing in Social Insects. BirkhŠuser Verlag, Basel

Homepage: : http://entomology.wisc.edu/~jeanne/
Email: jeanne@entomology.wisc.edu

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