NESTING ARCHITECTURE 



are occupied by those living honey-pots, the rotunds, in 

 the Occident nests are used as store-rooms. Herein 

 one finds various sorts of seeds put away for food. In 

 a few cases rooms were found rilled with husks and 

 apparently sealed up, as if empty spaces had been 

 utilized in trie rush of business for "dumping-grounds," 

 to save transporting the waste matter of the seeds to 

 the outer gates and the kitchen -middens. Perhaps 

 these "relief chambers 75 were merely a temporary 

 makeshift, and would have been cleared out in due 

 course had not the commune suffered a destruction as 

 dire as that of ancient Troy or Carthage. 



Such great structures as have been described here 

 imply the work of years, and it is probable that some 

 of them were several years old. They showed every 

 mark of such age; in fact, the continuous life of an 

 ant community, in such sharp contrast with that of our 

 hornets and yellow - jackets, which do not survive 

 October, would naturally demand permanent or con- 

 tinuous residences, the permanency of the community 

 and the permanency of their dwelling going naturally 

 hand in hand. By calculations made from the levelled 

 floors of the mountain charcoal-burners, which had been 

 occupied by large mounds since their abandonment, I 

 concluded that some communities of Formica exsectoides 

 were at least thirty years old, and I believe that they 

 remain active for a longer period if unmolested. 



Livingstone (South Africa) speaks of ant-hills which 

 dotted the face of the country like haycocks in a harvest- 

 field. In the woods they were seen twenty feet high 

 and forty to fifty feet in diameter. He also notes the 

 fact that these spots are more fertile than the rest of 

 the land, and are the chief garden ground for maize, 

 3 23 



