Fig. 4.

Intracolonial rarity of royal cheats. (a) Mean ± SEM abundance within colonies of the six royal–small worker (SW) patrilines, the four royal–large worker (LW) patrilines, and the 19 normal unbiased patrilines. (b) Proposed suppression mechanism that induces rarity. Larvae in normal patrilines (gray) signal queen potential at a normally distributed critical size (arbitrary units) with royal patrilines having slightly (royal–LW, blue) or substantially (royal–SW, red) lower means. Royal–SW patrilines are 75% rarer than other patrilines, which makes their queen-biased larvae harder for adult workers to distinguish from the distribution tail for normal patrilines and allows them to escape suppression.