374 BuLun IX 83 



commit no aggression. Probably no person approaching near to 

 maturity has been so fortunate as to escape a painful experience 

 with one of these, and it is perhaps because of their commonness 

 and wide distribution that we do not greatly and unreasoningly 

 fear them. As a matter of fact, they are quite as much to be 

 dreaded as some supposedly more dangerous animals which are 

 less common or of more restricted distribution. More than one 

 case of serious illness and even of death is on record from the 

 stings of ordinary honey-bees, and to some individuals a single 

 sting is a very serious matter. We commonly recognize the fact 

 of wide individual variation in respect to the effects of the poison, 

 of bee or wasp stings, and this principle applies equally to the 

 poisons of spiders, centipedes, scorpions and the like. When the 

 average person suffers comparatively little from a single sting or 

 even from several stings at one time, a particular individual may 

 have some peculiar characteristic of constitution or temperament 

 which makes for serious illness with but one or a few stings. The. 

 local pain and inflammation varies somewhat, but not so much, 

 perhaps, as the constitutional eft'ects of the poison. It may be well 

 to state in passing that the great majority of bees and wasps are 

 useful insects, the former for pollination of flowers, and the latter 

 for destruction of many injurious insects. Therefore, they should 

 not be molested save in particular instances when they are so 

 located as to be nuisances. This must be qualified somewhat for 

 the ants. Many of them doubtless do great good in destroying 

 injurious insects, but some denude an appreciable percentage of 

 tilled ground, and some have been reported injurious to livestock. 

 Herms reports as follows on one of the "harvester ants" : 



"One of the most formidable stinging ants in California is 

 Pogonomyrmex californicus. This ant will not only attack humans 

 but also small domesticated animals. Thus hog raisers in the Im- 

 perial Yallev, California, report many pigs killed by ants, one 

 farmer reporting a loss of 400 small pigs during one year and an- 

 other 100 to 150 during a period of three years, — all killed by ants." 

 This report, Herms says, is not fully verified, yet it cannot at, 

 present be safely denied. We have this species and othfers of 

 Pogonomyrmex in Arizona. Professor Wheeler, a distinguished 

 authority on ants, reports on the stings of Pogonomyrmex kinds as 

 follows : 



"The sting of these ants is remarkably severe, and the fiery, 

 numbing pain which it produces may last for hours. On several 

 occasions when my hands and legs had been stung by several of 



