1909] The Ottawa Naturalist 169 



tents on the Spurge. They were of the "carton" t\'pe. con- 

 structed of finely triturated wood and in these shelters the ants 

 kept the plant -lice; they were thus protected from their 

 enemies and also from the rain and strong sunlight. Forel, who 

 has added so much to our knowledge of the lives of these insects, 

 has described a number of different kinds of "cow-sheds" which 

 several European species of Lasius constructed. A certain 

 species, L. brunneus, constructs shelters made of detritus, that 

 is, minute inorganic or mineral particles such as sand, etc., over 

 large bark aphides. Certain species of Myrmica make earthen 

 cells to enclose the aphides and these chambers communicate 

 with the rest by means of covered galleries. Our greatest 

 American authority on ants, Prof. W. M. Wheeler, informed 

 me, when I was studying these interesting habits, that Lasius 

 niger and its American varieties are in the habit of constructing 

 shelters over plant-lice and mealy bugs, and he refers to this 

 habit in his interesting paper on the habits of the tent-building 

 ant, Cremaiogaster lineolata. Say. (in Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. 

 Hist., Vol. 22, 1906). The common American varietv, L. niger 

 var. americana, occasionally builds detritus tents around the 

 stems of plants. 



The Japanese colonies of Lasius niger which Dr. Stopes 

 discovered seemed to have reached the highest stage of agri- 

 cultural development; even the ants seemed to be imbued with 

 the Japanese spirit of progress! She discovered tents on the 

 evergreen oak. Ilex integra, of a cylindrical shape, encircling the 

 terminal portions of shoots arising from the stumps of a stem 

 that had been cut down. These tents were of the detritus type 

 and made of minute grains of black sand mixed with white 

 fragments of broken shell the trees were growing near the sea 

 at Havama. The whole twig, with the exceptions of the tips 

 of the leaves, was enclosed in the detritus tent through which 

 ran galleries swarming with ants. But these particular ants were 

 not -content to construct "cow-sheds" merely, but for their own 

 comfort had built of the same detritus covered galleries which 

 wound round the trunk of the tree and communicated with the 

 nests which were underground, so that they could reach the 

 "cow-sheds" in all weather. Other shelters which may have 

 been the initial stages of the larger tents, were made by the ants 

 by biting the undersides of the midribs of the leaves. This 

 caused the leaves to become inrolled with their uppersides out- 

 wards and the spaces thus formed by the inrolling was filled with 

 detritus to form chambers. 



Ants appear to construct the two types of tents the 

 carton type made of fibrous material of a vegetable nature, and 

 the detritus type made of inorganic material: both kinds of 



