ADOPTION OF QUEENS BY ALIEN SPECIES. 307 



is what led to the discovery by Wheeler of the phenomenon 

 of temporary parasitism among ants. At the same time he also 

 showed that temporary parasitism exists in other American ants 

 and predicted that it would be found to exist in certain European 

 ants. These predictions have since been verified by a number 

 of European myrmecologists. The results of the experiments 

 recorded in this paper verify his predictions concerning the queens 

 of A. tennesseensis, L. latipes, L. umbratus minutus and show that 

 F. obscuriventris is a temporary parasite upon F. subsericea just 

 as he has shown that the European F. rufa is parasitic upon the 

 typical F. fusca. 1 



A question which will naturally arise in the minds of most 

 people is, "To what extent would it be possible to secure the 

 adoption of non-parasitic queens by workers of different species 

 or even of different colonies of the same species?" Much light 

 would be thrown on the whole subject if an extensive series of 

 experiments with such queens should be conducted, and in the 

 future I hope to be able to perform such experiments. Also, 

 the logician will say that it should not only be proved that queens 

 that are supposed to be temporary parasites may be adopted by 

 workers of another species but it should also be proved that such 

 queens are incapable of founding colonies unaided. That such 

 is the case with some of the queens experimented upon we have 

 only such negative evidence as I have given above, and positive 

 evidence, one way or the other, can be obtained only by an ex- 

 tensive series of careful experiments. However, positive evi- 

 dence that any of the queens given above as temporary parasites 

 are able to establish colonies independently would not neces- 

 sarily prove that they may not also be in part temporarily para- 

 sitic upon some other species. It is more than likely that a very 

 large number, perhaps most of the ants are in some stage of 

 development toward parasitism. For instance, the above ex- 

 periments show that the queens of F. obscuriventris are not so 

 easily adopted as those of F. consocians but much more easily 

 than those of F. nepiicula or of A. tennesseensis. Wheeler has 

 shown that the first step toward both temporary and permanent 

 parasitism from the primitive independent type of colony for- 



1 "Observations on some European Ants," 1909. 



