THE QUEEN ANT 293 



Then the fertilized queen descends to the earth and at once divests her- 

 self of her 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 restricted to a 

 purely terrestrial existence, and has gone back to the ancestral 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 in- e 

 herited disposition, ordinarily called 

 instinct, she sets out alone to create a 

 colony out of her own substance. She 

 begins by excavating a small burrow, 



..-, . ,, mi Fig. 2. Head of a Recently Fertil- 



either m the open soil, under some IZED QuEEN 0F Mla sexdevs L0NGITUDIN . 



Stone Or in rotten wood. She enlarges ally bisected; a, mandible; b, labium 

 .,,,., -. „ ., , j, retracted; c, buccal pocket, containing 



the blind end of the burrow to form a d the pellet of fungna hyphffi carried 

 small chamber and then completely irom tne parental nest, e, oesophagus, /, 



, . -. oral orifice. (After J. Huber.) 



closes the opening to the outside world. 



The labor of excavating often wears away all her mandibular teeth, 

 rubs the hairs from her body and mars her burnished or sculptured 

 armor, thus producing a number of mutilations, which, though occur- 

 ring generation after generation in species that nest in hard, stony soil, 

 are, of course, never inherited. In the cloistered seclusion of her cham- 

 ber the queen now passes days, weeks, or even months, waiting for the 

 eggs to mature in her ovaries. When these eggs have reached their full 

 volume at the expense of her fat-body and degenerating, wing-muscles, 

 they are fertilized with a few of the many thousand spermatozoa stored 

 up in her spermatheca and laid. The queen nurses them in a little 

 packet till they hatch as minute larvse. These she feeds with salivary 

 secretion derived by metabolism from the same source as the eggs, 

 namely, from her fat-body and wing-muscles. The larva? grow slowly. 

 pupate prematurely and hatch as unusually small but otherwise normal 

 workers. In some species it takes fully ten months to bring such a 

 brood of minim workers to maturity, and during all this time the queen 

 takes no nourishment, but merely draws on her reserve tissues. As 

 soon as the workers mature, they break through the soil and thereby 

 make an entrance to the nest and establish a communication with the 

 outside world. They enlarge the original chamber and continue the 

 excavation in the form of galleries. They go forth in search of food 

 and share it with their exhausted mother, who now exhibits a further 

 and final change in her behavior. She becomes so exceedingly timid 



