Data from: The extension of foundress lifespan and the evolution of eusociality in the Hymenoptera

The evolution of effectively sterile workers in the aculeate Hymenoptera
(ants, bees and stinging wasps) requires that a female’s lifespan largely
overlap that of her daughters. The evolution of long nest foundress
lifespans in eusocial species from the short lifespans of solitary species
is investigated. Analyses that control for phylogeny show for the first
time that foundress adult lifespan increases, and first-brood offspring
development time decreases, with increasing colony size, resulting in the
ratio of foundress adult lifespan to worker total lifespan increasing with
increasing colony size. These patterns support the hypothesis that the
reproductive division of labour increases with increasing colony size,
explaining the evolution of effectively sterile workers in species with
large colonies. However, there is a discrete increase in foundress adult
lifespan in the transition from non-eusociality to eusociality that is
independent of colony size. An analysis of life history characters
suggests that this increase is explained by nests being founded by
multiple females and progressive feeding of larvae as they develop. A
reduced rate of senescence of a dominant co-foundress may be selected as a
plastic response to social status if high-risk tasks performed by
subordinate co-foundresses reduce the dominant’s extrinsic mortality rate.
Multiple-foundress nests in which one female is responsible for most or
all the reproduction (semisociality) and in which foundresses are full
sisters are favoured by haplodiploidy, perhaps explaining why eusociality
is so common in the Hymenoptera.