A Common Topic of Study Among Biologists Who Study Social

Essay

A common topic of study among biologists who study social insects is colony integration, i.e. the ways members of a society interact with and influence each other. Previous research suggests that the queen of a wasp nest seems to encourage worker activity. That research is anecdotal, and quantitative information is lacking. The following data were gathered from wasp nests in California and Iowa. The nests were studied very early in their development, so each wasp could be individually identified using standard marking procedures, and their activity levels monitored reliably. The table below contains the proportions of time spent on the nest for 12 randomly selected colonies in Iowa. (The colony numbers are for identification in the table only.) There is only one queen per nest, so the proportion is for her only. The workers proportion is the average proportion for all the worker bees in the nest. (a) Construct a comparative (back to back) stem & leaf plot of the proportions of time spent on the nest by Queens, and by Workers for these colonies.
(b) Using your plot in part (a), describe the differences and similarities in the distributions of the proportion of time spent on the nest by workers and queens.