WASPS, ANTS AND BEES 203 



There are several different ways in which a new community 

 may be founded. A fertilized queen may begin alone the 

 establishment of a new community by building a little nest, 

 laying a few eggs, caring for the hatching larvae herself, and 

 thus raising by her unaided exertions a small brood of neuter 

 workers which are always normally undersized, probably from 

 insufficient nourishment. This mode of community founding 

 is just like that obtaining among the social wasps and the 

 bumble-bees. An interesting fact in these cases is that the 

 food given the larvae by the queen is supplied from her own 

 body, by regurgitation through the mouth, no food whatever 

 being brought into the nest from the time that the queen first 

 begins to lay eggs until this first brood is matured. 



Another method of colony founding is by the withdrawal of 

 young fertilized queens each with a group of workers from an 

 old and over-populous community. Still other methods are 

 those, recently carefully worked out by Wheeler and other 

 students, in which queen ants of one species found colonies by 

 the aid of workers of other species. Several phases of this 

 method have been observed. In one phase a queen enters a 

 colony of an alien species and decapitates its queen or is the 

 occasion of her being killed off by her own workers. The 

 intruding queen is then adopted by the workers and proceeds 

 to lay eggs whose hatching larvae are reared by the alien 

 workers and a compound or mixed colony is thus formed. In 

 another phase of this general method a queen enters a colony 

 of another species, snatches up the worker brood and kills any 

 of the workers or queens that endeavor to dispute her posses- 

 sions. The ants hatch with a sense of affiliation with their 

 foster mother and proceed to rear her eggs and larvae as soon 

 as they appear. Here, too, the colony is formed by a mixture 

 of two species, but the workers produced by the intrusive 

 queens inherit her predatory instincts and therefore become 

 slave-makers. They keep on kidnapping worker larvas and 

 pupae from the nests of the alien species, carry them home, and 

 eat some of them but permit many to mature, so that the mixed 

 character of the colony is maintained. 



The observation and study of ants' ways must be mostly 



