3O2 MAURICE COLE TANQUARY. 



the fact that these females have not been seen in the act of found- 

 ing a colony and one additional fact which may be mentioned, 

 the mimetic coloration of the females (the color of these females 

 is exactly the same as that of the darker form of americanus) t 

 I think justifies us in concluding that the queen of this species 

 is in all probability, temporarily parasitic upon the common 

 L. americanus. 



POLYERGUS LUCIDUS. 



This shining slave-maker has been studied by Mrs. Treat, 

 McCook, Burill, and Wheeler, 1 and the European form P. rufes- 

 cens, by Huber, Forel, Wasmann and Viehmeyer. It differs 

 from the ants mentioned above in that it is not a temporary 

 but a permanent parasite or slave-maker, the workers making 

 raids upon colonies of Formica schaufussi and' its varieties incerta 

 and nitidiventris. 



Studies by Forel, Wasmann and Viehmeyer on the European 

 P. rufescens tend to show that that form resembles the temporary 

 parasites in that the queens may be adopted by fusca workers. 

 In regard to the founding of colonies by P. lucidus Wheeler says: ? 

 "Several experiments in which I introduced artificially dealated 

 queens of lucidus into nests containing incerta workers with their 

 brood gave rather conflicting results. In some cases the lucidus 

 queens behaved like the sanguinea queens under similar conditions 

 to the extent of killing the alien workers, but they paid absolutely 

 no attention to the brood. In other cases they were passive 

 and conciliatory but equally indifferent to the incerta cocoons. 

 It will be necessary therefore to study this question further 

 before making definite statements in regard to the methods em- 

 ployed by our American amazons in establishing colonies." 



The queens used in the following experiments were obtained 

 on the slope of Blue Hill, August 17, the same date upon which 

 we found the large colony of F. obscuriventris mentioned above. 

 The nest was along the side of a little-used roadway. On ex- 

 cavating and bringing it to the laboratory I found the colony 

 to contain about a dozen workers, an equal number of winged 



'See Wheeler, "Ants, Their Structure, Development and Behavior," pp. 482- 



487- 



2 "Ants, Their Structure, Development and Behavior," p. 486. 



