Bald-faced hornet hydrocarbons serve as a barrier to moisture diffusion and thus prevent dehydration in wasps. Cuticular hydrocarbon profiles vary over species and nests, and so cuticular hydrocarbons are a proposed mechanism for nest-mate recognition. Worker and queen cuticular lipids have similar components, but their distributions differ dramatically, implying that cuticular hydrocarbons also play a role in caste differentiation. The following lipid profiles were determined from specimens collected in the summer and early fall of northeastern Georgia in 1989. The dominant hydrocarbons recovered from the cuticles of workers were n-alkanes and methyl branched and dimethyl branched alkanes with a C27 or a
Bald-faced hornet the queen's brood. In a sampling of seven "D. maculata nests", 20.9% of males were produced by workers. The percentage of males who were workers’ sons did not correlate with the time during which nests were collected or colony size. Because worker relatedness is so high in "D. maculata", workers are more related to other workers' sons than to the queen's own sons, and therefore worker policing of egg production does not occur. An explanation for the queen's near monopoly on male production is that worker production is costly and therefore reduces total colony reproduction. The cost toward worker production