12 ADELE M. FIELDE. 



The female descendants of sister queens would thus become 

 more unlike in odor with every generation. 



An odor providing the means of recognizing a maternal ances- 

 tor, or another descendant of that ancestor, may be dominant 

 through more than one generation of females. 



The fact that worker ants who have never met any queen will 

 as joyfully associate with their queen-mother's sister as with their 

 own mother, indicates that sister-queens have the same odor after 

 mating that they had before mating, and that the first divergence 

 in odor becomes apparent to the ants only in the offspring of 

 sister-queens that mated with males capable of imparting unlike 

 odors to their respective progeny. The worker ants, having 

 attained the distinctive progressive odor characterizing their 

 mothers' worker- offspring for the current year, may produce 

 males who will each impart to his progeny the distinctive odor 

 borne by all the female issue of the queen with whom he mates. 

 Each generation in the line of queens would then depart farther 

 from the odor of the queen ancestor, and we should find, as we 

 do, colonies in which all the female inhabitants are inimical to all 

 the female inhabitants of another colony. There would also be 

 produced, as in colonies of Stenammafulvum, where queens mate 

 within the nest and remain to increase its population, the phe- 

 nomenon of callows that, if segregated from the pupa-stage, 

 refuse to affiliate with queens from the nest in which were depos- 

 ited the eggs from which these callows issued. 



During several years I have been interested in ascertaining 

 whether adult, queenless workers would willingly accept a queen 

 who was indisputably of another colony of their own species, and 

 among many experiments I have never seen such an acceptance. 

 If forced into association, escape of either party being made im- 

 possible, the workers may after a longer or shorter interval live 

 peaceably with the alien queen, as they also may do with alien 

 workers. But such forced alliances do not result in normal pros- 

 perity, even when a whole year is allowed for the cementing of 

 friendship. So exacting are the ants concerning adherence to 

 their standard of odor that they prefer a queenless state to the 

 presence of an unknown ant-oclor. Observations made by me 

 in the summer of 1905 accord with my earlier ones. Eleven 



