4*>3 ANTS. 



torv parasite is not a bed of roses. The amazons have indeed acquired 

 brilliant military instincts, but if these ants were capable of reflection 

 they might occasionally regret having abandoned the quiet pastoral life 

 which their ancestors probably led. 



(c) r<>lycr</ns Incidus (Figs. 270 and 271). This is the largest, 

 handsomest and most graceful of our amazons, and even surpasses the 

 European form in its brilliant red coloring and gleaming surface. It 

 may be called the shining amazon. Owing to its wide distribution in 

 the Eastern States it has been known for some time. Mrs. Treat 

 (1877) and Me Cook (18806) saw its colonies, but Burrill (1908) 

 is the only author who has described one of its forays. In the 

 Atlantic States it is very rare and sporadic. During the past five years 

 1 have seen only four of its colonies in New York and Xew Jersey, and 

 these were at great distances from one another. It is more frequently 

 met with on the warm eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Colo- 

 rado, where, unlike breviceps, it occurs only at lower elevations. It 

 is the furthest removed of all of our subspecies from the European type 

 in its smooth surface, in the coloring of its queens, which, in eastern 

 colonies, at least, have the head and thorax nearly black, in the small 

 size of its communities and the character of its slaves. These are not 

 members of the fusca, but of the pallid e-fnlra group of Formica, and 

 are represented by schaufussi, or the closely allied incerta or nitidi- 

 ventris. The very small size of the colonies of these ants may account 

 for the same peculiarity in lucidits. The slave species makes obscure 

 crater nests in sunny, open pastures and such places are therefore also 

 the home of the shining amazons. The ratio of these to slaves 

 in the mixed colonies is about i : 5 or 6. It is an interesting fact 

 that Incidns resembles its slaves in having a smooth, shining sur- 

 face, a slender, elegant stature and long legs, whereas breviceps and 

 bicolor resemble the fusca form^ which they enslave, in having a more 

 pilose and pubescent surface, more thickset stature and shorter legs. 

 These resemblances may therefore be regarded as mimetic. 



Near my former home in Bronxville, N. Y., there was an unusually 

 fine lucldus-incerta colony, which I had under observation for five 

 years. During four years this colony produced numbers of males and 

 females, both winged and ergatoid, and the winged females lingered 

 for weeks in the nest without deflation. The first week of April 

 1908, I found the whole community with its larvse and mother queen 

 enjoying the spring warmth in the superficial galleries just under the 

 large flat stone with which I covered the nest in September 1903. I 

 captured the queen and part of the colony and transferred them to 

 an artificial nest. August 9 I again visited the nest, and to my 



