METHODS OF COLLECTING AXD STUDYING AXTS. 547 



should be occasionally moistened with water, or the ants will die. 

 Large, wide-mouthed bottles or vials that can be plugged with cotton 

 are often more useful than bags, especially for the accommodation of 

 small colonies. Each colony from which specimens are taken, either 

 for the cabinet or for the artificial nest, should be given a number and 

 all the important data concerning it should be entered in a note book. 



Nothing is easier than to find ants in the fields and woods. The 

 most convenient place to seek them is under stones and logs, but many 

 specimens rarely or never nest in such situations and must be sought 

 under or in bark, in rotten wood, hollow twigs, old galls and rootstocks, 

 in vegetable mould, about the roots of plants, or in the open soil of 

 the woods and fields. The nests of many small species which form 

 diminutive colonies, are extremely difficult to find unless individual 

 workers are first located on the soil or vegetation and then carefully 

 followed while they are returning to their nest. 



For study large series, illustrating all the obtainable phases in a 

 colony, should be mounted dry, and the greatest care should be taken 

 to avoid mixing specimens from different nests and localities. Ants 

 should always be carded and in no case no matter how large the 

 specimens should they have pins run through their thoraces. Some 

 myrmecologists prefer to glue the specimens on small triangular, or 

 rather trapezoidal pieces of card, in such a position that the body of 

 the ant lies at right angles to the long axis of the card and across its 

 shortest side, which is turned to the left and should be broad enough 

 to support at least the posterior portion of the thorax, the whole pedicel 

 and the base of the gaster. A stout insect pin is then run through 

 the middle of the broad right-hand end of the card. It is convenient 

 and economical to mount three such specimens, one above the other, 

 on the same pin. The size of the trapezoidal cards must, of course, 

 be adapted to the size of the ants. Other myrmecologists prefer to 

 glue the ants singly, or in a series, on a square or oblong card, and to 

 run the pin through the card behind instead of to the right of the speci- 

 mens. I would earnestly insist on the advantages of mounting ants 

 in one or both of these ways because the method of pinning them, as if 

 they were flies or bees, entails an enormous loss of valuable material 

 in collections. Ants mounted in this way are almost sure, sooner or 

 later, to break at the neck or pedicel and lose the head or gaster, or 

 both. Many specimens in the great number of collections that have 

 been sent to me for study from various parts of the United States have 

 been rendered worthless by this vicious method of mounting. Xo 

 matter how thoroughly one may know our ants, there is little satisfac- 

 tion in identifying a species which is represented only by a thorax or 



