Fig. 1.

Factorial design of the experiment. For the ‘Workers’ axis, each group of queens either did (+) or did not (−) have workers present in the nest. For the ‘Stage’ axis, each group of queens was either in the earliest stages of the nest-founding period, in which workers had not yet begun to emerge in the nest (‘Early’) or in the later stages of the founding phase, when workers had begun to emerge (‘Late’). EQW+, early-stage queens with workers; EQW−, early-stage queens without workers; LQW−, late-stage queens without workers; LQW+, late-stage queens with workers.