REPORT OF THE STATE ENTOMOLOGIST II5 



Ants in a Lawn.* 



(Ord. Hymenoptera: Fam. Formicid^e.) 



In the preceding Report of the Series (Tenth), "Ants on Fruit Trees," 

 have been treated of. Relief is now asked from the operations of ants 

 which infest a lawn in Queens county, Long Island, as stated in the fol- 

 lowing communication: 



A friend of mine on the south side of Long Island has a beautiful lawn 

 of several acres which a few years ago was a dense woods. This lawn 

 during the summer is alive with ants, which in a measure destroy its 

 beauty and are very annoying to the owner. What can be done to get 

 rid of them ? He does not want to plow it up unless absolutely neces- 

 sary. Would fertilizer, plaster or lime of any kind used now or in the 

 early spring be of any use? F. F. East Williston, N. Y. 



About 200 species of ants are known in the United States, and in this 

 large number, as might well be supposed, there is great diversity in habits. 

 Nearly all of them live in the ground, and comparatively few are to be 

 classed as injurious. But even without being positively injurious, they 

 may, when numerous, become annoying from their biting — in some 

 species stinging, when they get upon the person, or in throwing up 

 unsightly heaps of the soil that they infest. 



The best method, or even an effectual one, for ridding the lawn of the 

 ants with which it "is alive during the summer," cannot be given with- 

 out a knowledge of the species of ant of which complaint is made. It is 

 not improbable that the dense woods that a few years ago occupied the 

 place of the present lawn, may have contained a few colonies of the 

 mound-building ant, Formica nifa, sometimes known as "the fallow 

 ant," which throws up from the soil beneath, through the labors of its 

 immense colonies, mounds of a foot or two in height and several feet in 

 diameter. These mounds are abundant in some portions of the Alle- 

 ghanies in Pennsylvania. We have seen them in the Catskills and in the 

 Shawangunk range at Lake Mohonk, but while the species is common 

 over a large portion of our country (also in Europe), we do not know 

 that its habit of constructing these large mounds, is co-extensive with its 

 distribution. 



In the transformation of a wood into a lawn, the large colonies would 

 naturally be broken up, and the subsequent care of the ground would 

 tend to their distribution into smaller colonies, in which the original 

 feet dimensions might be reduced to inches. 



* Published in the Country Gentleman for January 3, 1895. 



