300 WHEELER. 



the cocoons into jars of formalin and was therefore able to go through- 

 the material at my leism*e in the laboratory. 



I had collected every one of the cocoons in the hope that some of 

 them might contain pupal females, but all proved to be males in 

 precisely the same stage and very nearly ready to hatch. The two 

 females had evidently recently emerged for their colors were very 

 brilliant and the delicate golden pile on their bodies was intact. ]\Iore- 

 over, their ovaries were undeveloped as shown by the relatively small 

 size of the gaster. That this part of the body must later become 

 greatly distended, with the maturation of the ovaries, and must have 

 its sclerites separated by the extension of the white intersegmental 

 membranes, may be inferred from Luederwaldt's figures of an old 

 queen of E. (L.) praedator and from my observations on aged queens 

 of the North American species of Acamatus (1900, 1901). I believe, 

 therefore, that the large hurchcUi colony which ]\Ir. Emerson and I 

 were able to investigate, had already completed the production of its 

 annual brood of workers and soldiers and that the sexual forms con- 

 stituted a later or, at any rate, a retarded brood, consisting of a large- 

 number of males, all in the same stage and destined to hatch before- 

 the end of July, or before the incidence of the dry season, and a very 

 few females, which had hatched before any of the males. The old 

 female, or mother of the colony, had probably died recently. Hence 

 it would seem that this hurchcUi colony was proterogynic, and destined 

 later to separate into two colonies, each with its own young queen, 

 for it is practically certain that new Eciion colonies must be thus- 

 formed by fission of an old colony and not, as in most ants, by isolated, 

 recently fecundated females. The fecundation of the Eciion queens 

 is still an unsolved problem. Perhaps the two hurchelli queens would 

 have been fecundated by some of their brothers about to hatch, i. e. 

 adelphogamically, though we cannot exclude the possibility of fecun- 

 dation by males from other colonies of the same species. Such males 

 might be temporarily adopted or might hastily fecundate the young 

 queens while they are being moved along during one of the frequent 

 migrations of the colony. 



I was astonished to find the male hurchcUi pupje in cocoons as all the 

 pupae I had seen in the Texan Ecitons (subgen. Acamatus) were nude. 

 But these were all worker pupse. On reading Beebe's account (1919) 

 of the hurchcUi colony that had bivouacked in the store-room of the 

 Kartabo laboratory, I learned that he had given an interesting account 

 of the method of spinning the cocoon by a lot of larvse which had been 

 assembled by the workers on the surface of an old board. He says: 



