THE PROGRESSIVE ODOR OF ANTS. 3 



progressive odor in the workers is definite and indisputable, the 

 five successive broods included in the experiment being the issue 

 of one queen. 



The N Queen.- -This queen was captured on Nonamesset 

 Island, July 28, 1903. She was then deflated and was probably 

 the mother of the hundred workers seen in her wild nest, and 

 also of the ants that afterwards hatched from the many cocoons 

 brought with her to the laboratory. She remained under my 

 care and, unless another is indicated, she is the queen referred to 

 in the herein recorded experiments. 



The Ni Group of Workers. Some of the captured workers 

 were transferred to Dr. Irving A. Field, and they remained segre- 

 gated in his care, usually at Harvard University, until the time 

 of the experiment in which they appear. As no other than male 

 offspring had appeared in this group during the two years of its 

 separation from the queen mother, the workers composing it in 

 August, 1905,, were certainly acquainted with the queen pre- 

 vious to her capture in July, 1903. Of the age of these workers 

 of course nothing more was known than that it exceeded two 

 years. 



On August 6, 1905, I introduced into this nest, 1 where there 

 were six major and five minor workers and about thirty larvae 

 from their own eggs, the queen-mother from whom these eleven 

 workers had been separated for two years. The queen showed 

 instant hostility, seized a major worker by one of its mandibles, 

 braced herself on the sponge and held her prisoner there during 

 the ensuing seven hours. All the other workers, sometimes six 

 at a time, examined the queen meanwhile. They patted her with 

 their antennae, nabbed her gently, and licked her back and legs. 

 Two of them, touching her body with their antennae, appeared to 

 dance for joy, shuffling their feet with great rapidity during 

 several consecutive minutes. The queen then began to drag the 

 worker that she had seized, and upon my releasing the latter, took 

 a position near the larvae-pile, as if to claim her incipient grand- 

 sons as her exclusive property, opening her mandibles at every 

 worker who approached. Then followed a most curious and pro- 



1 All the artificial nests referred to in this paper were of the Fielde pattern. See 

 "Portable Ant-Nests," BIOLOGICAL BULLETIN, Vol. VII., No. 4, September, 1504. 



