HARVESTING ANTS. 49 



harhara attending on or searching for apliides and the 

 like. These captives took part of a small quantity of 

 honey which I placed in the nest, but displayed no 

 eagerness about it, and soon neglected and allowed it 

 to be covered up with earth thrown out from the nest. 



Tlie ants work very frequently at night during 

 the dark,* and this is the case in the wild as well 

 as in the captive nests. A friend, at my request 

 twice visited a nest of sfructor ants in the garden of an 

 hotel at Mentone, when it was quite dark (in March, 

 between seven and eight o'clock p.m.) and no moon, 

 but the light of a candle showed that the workers, 

 both large and small, were busily engaged in carrying 

 into the nest seeds which had been purposely scattered 

 in their neighbourhood. I have myself seen Pheidole 

 mcgacephala similarly engaged at about nine p.m. on 

 a warm night in April, when it was perfectly dark, 

 not even the stars showing ; but in this case the ants 

 were collecting from the weeds in the garden. On the 

 same occasion I also observed long and active trains 

 r)f Formica emargitiaia [a rather small dusky ant, with 

 a yellow thorax], making for the orange-trees in search 

 of cocci and apliides, just as if it were broad day. 



Before leaving Mentone, on May 1, T turned out 

 this second captive nest, and found that the colony 

 appeared perfectly healthy, and did not seem to have 

 diminished materially in numbers. The queen ant 

 and the larvse seemed to be in just the same state as 

 when they were taken. The earth in the lower part 

 of the jar was honeycombed with galleries, granaries, 



* This beara out the much-questioned assertion of Aristotle, though he 

 only claimed that ants work "by night when the moon is at the full." — H'st. 

 Anim., lib. ix. cap. xxvi. 



