  Social insects provide an excellent platform to investigate flow of
information in regulatory systems since their successful social organization is
essentially achieved by effective information transfer through complex
connectivity patterns among the colony members. Network representation of such
behavioural interactions offers a powerful tool for structural as well as
dynamical analysis of the underlying regulatory systems. In this paper, we
focus on the dominance interaction networks in the tropical social wasp
\textit{Ropalidia marginata} - a species where behavioural observations
indicate that such interactions are principally responsible for the transfer of
information between individuals about their colony needs, resulting in a
regulation of their own activities. Our research reveals that the dominance
networks of \textit{R. marginata} are structurally similar to a class of
naturally evolved information processing networks, a fact confirmed also by the
predominance of a specific substructure - the `feed-forward loop' - a key
functional component in many other information transfer networks. The dynamical
analysis through Boolean modeling confirms that the networks are sufficiently
stable under small fluctuations and yet capable of more efficient information
transfer compared to their randomized counterparts. Our results suggest the
involvement of a common structural design principle in different biological
regulatory systems and a possible similarity with respect to the effect of
selection on the organization levels of such systems. The findings are also
consistent with the hypothesis that dominance behaviour has been shaped by
natural selection to co-opt the information transfer process in such social
insect species, in addition to its primal function of mediation of reproductive
competition in the colony.
