ABSTRACT
Because ant workers are sterile (or nearly so), the most important social relationship in a worker's life is that between the worker and the queen{s) whose offspring the worker rears. If the worker rears the offspring of her mother or some other close relative with whom she shares many genes, her investment oflabor results in the production of many replicates of the worker's own genes even if the worker produces no offspring of her own (Hamilton, 1964). However, if the worker rears the offspring of an unrelated queen, her labor is wasted in the replication of genes that she does not share. For this reason we might expect that robust mechanisms would have evolved to ensure that workers invest their labor in the offspring of kin only (Hamilton 1964).
