Data from: Variation in season length and development time is sufficient to drive the emergence and coexistence of social and solitary behavioral strategies

Season length and its associated variables can influence the expression of
social behaviors, including the occurrence of eusociality in insects.
Among bees, ants, and wasps, social behaviors can vary widely across
environmental gradients, both within and between different species. While
numerous theoretical models have been developed to examine the traits in a
species’ life history that underlie the emergence and maintenance of
eusociality, the impact of seasonality on this process is largely
uncharacterized. Here, we present a theoretical model that builds on these
foundational models by incorporating season length and offspring
development time. The integration of these environmental and life history
traits into a single, individual-focused model enables detailed
examination of how these factors can shape the costs and benefits of
social living. We find that longer season lengths and faster brood
development times are sufficient to favor the emergence and maintenance of
a social strategy, while shorter seasons favor a solitary one. We also
identify a range of season lengths where social and solitary strategies
can coexist. Moreover, our theoretical predictions are well-matched to the
natural history and behavior of two, flexibly-eusocial bee species,
suggesting our model can make realistic predictions about the evolution of
different social strategies. Broadly, this work reveals the crucial role
that environmental conditions can have in shaping social behavior and its
evolution and underscores the need for further models that explicitly
incorporate such variation to study evolutionary trajectories of
eusociality. The above data is needed to reproduce Figure 4 in this
manuscript, showing the matching between our theoretical predictions and
the weather data.