3i 6 



ANTS. 



either darkness or light, upon eggs, larvae or pupae, if left for a few 

 days unattended in the humid atmosphere required by the ants, and 

 its sprouting spores may be seen on their surfaces under a magnification 

 of about five hundred diameters. If the spores are left undisturbed 

 thev cover the vnung with a delicate dense white coat that becomes 

 sage-green with the ripening of the new spores. . . . This delicate 

 mould does not grow upon the bodies of dead ants, but is there replaced 

 by Rln'^of'its nigricans, with long and spreading hyphae, and in this 



FIG. 182. Old mound of Formica e.rsectoides covered with vegetation and with only 

 a few lingering remnants of the colony in its summit. (Original.) 



may lie the cause for the carrying off and casting away of all ants that 

 die or are killed in the nest." 



Botanists have described several peculiar arrangements in higher 

 plants, such as excessive hairness, slipperiness or stickiness of the stems, 

 or special palisades of hairs about the floral nectaries (nectarostegia) 

 as means of preventing ants and other desultory arthropods from plun- 

 dering the secretions intended for bees and other cross-fertilizing agents. 

 But these arrangements, if really developed for this purpose, are often 

 inefficacious. Vosseler (1906) has recently described an African ant 

 which manages to get around the woolly hairs protecting the nectaries 



