LITERATURE FOR 1916 ON ANTS AND MYRMECOPHILS 427 



Wheeler has stated in previous papers, that if the wings of a 

 virgin ant queen be removed, she will behave like a fertilized 

 queen. This does not seem to have been the case with Donis- 

 thorpe's queens which, as just related, behaved like workers 

 after removing their own wings. Crawley has maintained that 

 dealated virgin queens of the genus Lasius do not behave as 

 though fertilized. To test this question for Lasius, Donisthorpe 

 (7) on vSeptember 3rd, 1915, introduced into a queenless um- 

 bratus colony a virgin fuliginosus, from which he had removed 

 the wings. The queen ran around among the umbratus workers 

 tapping them with her antennae and was accepted by them. 

 She was cleaned and given the attention due a queen from her 

 workers. On September 7 the nest was left in the sun and some 

 of the workers began pulling the queen about; when the nest 

 was placed in a cool situation the queen was again accepted 

 and on December 19 had not again been attacked. Whether or 

 not a dealated virgin female will act as a queen, probably depends 

 upon more than mere loss of wings. The receptivity of the 

 colony in which she finds herself is undoubtedly important. 

 Crawley (5) points out that the tropical ant Tetramormimum 

 guineense has ergatoid females which are only slightly larger 

 than the workers and run about with them. 



ORIENTATION OF ANTS 



Brun (3) believes he has shown that the higher ants orient 

 by using large distant land-marks; he thinks the lower ants do 

 this also but to a smaller extent. The higher ants, he finds, 

 can complete the hypothenuse of a triangle, even from a con- 

 siderable distance. This, he says, is not due to kinaesthesia 

 or to a sense of angles but to the utilization of a visibly distant 

 landmark. These same species show some measure of local 

 memory and Brun believes that the recognition of ' ' known 

 localities" is probably a function of a " topochemical " sense, 

 while the choice of direction depends upon memory. 



Orientation after transport, according to Brun, depends on 

 the localization of illumination by the compound eyes and is 

 not exhibited if the illumination is bipolar. Ants cannot asso- 

 ciate a complex succession of diverse positions of the median 

 plane of the body, and except within narrow limits, there does 

 not seem to be much kinaesthetic sense of attitudes. There is 



