Polistes foundresses fight and dominant one lays most of the eggs Makes less sense for large-colony species. Under some conditions workers may police each others reproduction, to the ultimate gain of the queen. They could eat that egg, leaving the queen to make the males, or they could leave it alone. Policing in honey bees and stingless bees. Honeybees are multiply mated, so workers are predicted to police each other They do, as Ratnieks showed.
Stingless bees are a closely related group.
There is elaborate ritualized conflict between queen and workers during the oviposition process All this would fit with Ratnieks theory if stingless bees are singly mated. Policing in vespid wasps. A tribe of wasps in the neo-tropics with large colonies and multiple queens. In fact, queens produce the males in all four species, so the policing prediction holds only for the large-colony epipoinines, not for the small colony Polistes . If one part, such as the workers, gains nearly complete control, overt conflicts may disappear.