72 WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER 



in a locality very near the one in which I studied the nests. 

 Fully to appreciate his description, the reader must bear in mind 

 what I have said about the size of the females of this ant. They, 

 of course, have powerful stings, like the workers, though the 

 males are stingless and have feeble mandibles. Mr. Froggatt's 

 account runs as follows: 



"On January 30th, after some very hot, stormy weather, 

 while I was at Chevy Chase, near Armidale, N. S. W., I crossed 

 the paddock and climbed to the top of Mt. Roul, an isolated, 

 flat-topped, basaltic hill, which rises about 300 feet above the 

 surrounding open, cleared country. The summit, about half an 

 acre in extent, is covered with low "black-thorn" bushes {Busaria 

 spinifera). I saw no signs of bull-dog ant nests till I reached 

 the summit. Then I was enveloped in a regular cloud of the 

 great winged ants. They were out in thousands and thousands, 

 resting on the rocks and grass. The air was full of them, but 

 they were chiefly flying in great numbers about the bushes 

 where the males were copulating with the females. As soon as 

 a male (and there were apparently hundreds of males to every 

 female) captured a female on a bush, other males surrounded 

 the couple till there was a struggling mass of ants forming a 

 ball as big as one's fist. Then something seemed to give way, 

 the ball would fall to the ground and the ants would scatter. 

 As many as half a dozen of these balls would keep forming on 

 every little bush and this went on throughout the morning. 

 I was a bit frightened at first but the ants took no notice of me, 

 as the males were all so eager in their endeavors to seize the 

 females." 



Except for the great size of the participants, this nuptial 

 flight presents an exact picture of occasional flights of some of 

 our common Myrmicine ants, especially of Myrmica scabrinodis 

 Nyl. That such enormous swarms of Myrmecia as the one 

 described must be of rare occurrence, is evident from the state- 

 ment of such a keen observer as Mr. Froggatt that he has "never 

 before seen more than a dozen winged bull-dog ants of any 

 species together." I find, however, a brief description by 

 Tepper 1 of what must have been a very similar scene. He 

 describes a nuptial flight of one of the large species of Myrmecia 



1 Observations about the Habits of Some South Australian Ants. Trans. & 

 Proc. Roy. Soc. S. Austr., 5, 1882, pp. 24-26, 106-107. 



