POWER OF RECOGNITION AMONG ANTS. 249 



some of them into nests with kings of their own colony and others 

 of them into nests with kings of alien colonies, and believed that 

 I ascertained that the progeny of sister queens affiliated, regard- 

 less of paternal influence in the egg from which the ants issued. 

 I then supposed that queen-ants captured before swarming must 

 be virgin queens. I now know that virgin queen-ants often 

 mate with the males within the maternal domicile, and that 

 neither the possession of wings nor an early capture guarantee 

 the virginity of a queen. Only by sequestration of the queen 

 from her pupa-stage can her virginity be secured. I have had 

 Lasius latipes queens drop their wings and lay eggs soon after 

 being brought from the wild nest from which they had not yet 

 swarmed. In my artificial nests, I have observed the persistent 

 avoidance, by queens, of kings of alien colonies and their mani- 

 fest preference for kings of their own colony. Mating in captiv- 

 ity, in artificial nests, is not uncommon, and it must be frequent 

 in the wild nests before the swarming. 



We know that the eggs of workers often produce sturdy 

 males, and it appears probable that such males impart to the 

 fertilized eggs of the queen something of the odor attained by 

 the worker-mother at the time when the egg, producing the 

 male, was deposited. This would differentiate odors in the 

 progeny of sister queens, and cumulative differentiation would 

 account for ultimate differences in the odor of queens of the same 

 species and variety. When queens remain in the mother-nest 

 after mating, and there rear their broods, that colony must 

 become one of much mixed odors, as is the C colony described 

 in this paper. Fertilized queens, departing from the maternal 

 nest, would found colonies whose issuing queens would have an 

 odor depending on the age of the workers who were mothers of 

 kings hatched in the season in which their founder-queens mated. 



Besides discerning the aura of the nest and other local scents 

 and the track laid down by its feet, 1 an ant perceives in other ants 

 the incurred or incidental odor which appears with conditions and 

 disappears in course of time ; the inherited odor derived from the 

 queen-mother, apparent in the eggs, larvae, pupse and newly 



1 " Further Study of an Ant," A. M. Fielde, Proceedings of the Academy of Nat - 

 ural Sciences of Philadelphia, ""November, 1901, p. 521. 



