1 84 ANTS. 



race that chooses her lover, and enacts that the strongest alone shall 

 attain her in the solitude of the ether, she rises still; and, for the first 

 time in her life, the blue morning air rushes into her stigmata, singing 

 its song, like the blood of heaven, in the myriad tubes of the tracheal 

 sacs, nourished on -pace, that fill the center of her body. She rises 

 still. A region must be found unhaunted by birds, else that might 

 profane the nn>iery. She rises still; and already the ill-assorted troop 

 below are dwindling and falling asunder. The feeble, infirm, the aged, 

 unwelcome, ill- fed, who have flown from inactive or impoverished 

 cities, these renounce the pursuit and disappear in the void. Only a 

 .-.mall, indefatigable cluster remain, suspended in infinite opal. She 

 summons her wings for one final effort ; and now the chosen of in- 

 comprehensible forces has reached her, has seized her, and bounding 

 aloft with united impetus, the ascending spiral of their intertwined 

 flight whirls for one second in the hostile madness of love." 



It must be noted, however, that there are several important differ- 

 ences between the nuptial flights of ants and honey-bees. In the case 

 of the bees there is a single female for whom the males compete, 

 whereas among ants there may be hundreds of females. Moreover the 

 pairs of ants often descend to the earth in copula and always separate 

 without the female tearing away the male genitalia. Nor does the 

 female ant as a rule, return to the colony in which she was born. In 

 both cases the males die soon after mating. 



In the European literature there are many accounts of great nuptial 

 swarms of ants, visible from afar like clouds of smoke. Similar 

 swarms have also been witnessed in the United States. The species 

 usually concerned in producing this phenomenon are the common 

 Lasins nitjcr and M \nnica rnbra. The nuptials of our other species 

 take place, as a rule, without attracting particular attention. 



On descending to the earth the fertilized female divests herself of 

 her easily detached wings, either by pulling them off with her legs and 

 jaws or by rubbing them off against the grass-blades, pebbles or soil. 

 This act of deflation is the signal for important physiological and 

 psychological changes. She is now an isolated being, henceforth re- 

 stricted to a purely terrestrial existence, and has gone back to the ances- 

 tral level of the solitary female Hymenopteron. During her life in the 

 parental nest she stored her body with food in the form of masses of 

 fat and bulky wing-muscles. With this physiological endowment and 

 with an elaborate inherited disposition, ordinarily called instinct, she 

 sets out alone to create a colony out of her own substance. She begins 

 by excavating a small burrow, either in the open soil, under some 

 stone, or in rotten wood. She enlarges the blind end of the burrow to 



